AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings News with Matt Gagnon: Adaptive Cruise Control, Self Driving Cars, TikTok, Tencent and President Trump's Action

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Matt this morning and we had a good discussion about Self-Driving Cars, Adaptive Cruise Control, and what AAA found about their programming logic. Then we got into Tik Tok, WeChat, and Tencent and Why what President Trump's action was absolutely justified.   Let's get into my conversation with Matt on WGAN.

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

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: Is it going to avoid it by changing lanes? By stopping? What it going to do? In almost all the cases, these cars rear-ended this car slash balloon that was sitting right there in the lane.

Hey, good morning, Craig Peterson here. I had a great little interview this morning. I was on WGAN and affiliates AM and FM they're in Maine in Portland.

And I having fun with Matt. He actually took a little bit of a different angle on this, this morning. So we talked about what I think is the number one story this week. And we talked about what our friend Matt thinks. The number one story is this week. And, uh, yeah, I opened his eyes. He didn't realize what was really going on with President Trump's executive order about Tik Tok and We Chat.

So here we go.

[00:01:00] Matt Gagnon: It is Wednesday morning. It is Craig Peterson who joins us now. He is our tech guru and joins us every Wednesday at this time. We appreciate it as always. Craig, how are you this morning, sir? Craig's try it again. Where are you? There you go. There we go. Now I hear from you.

Craig Peterson: There's always a button.

Matt Gagnon: There is always a button and it's good to have you with us and Craig, you know, I am told, although I'm not certain about this, I am told that you also have a show on Saturday here. Is that true?

Craig Peterson: Yeah, I do from one til three on Saturday, and I take a much deeper dive into all of my show notes and the hot topics for the week.

And you know, if you get my newsletter, not only do we discuss some of this stuff with Matt, but we get right into it all.

Matt Gagnon: Indeed. So Craig, on what's on the top of your mind, here's a, I'm going to approach this a little differently with you usually, because I know you send a, you send the topics every week and we talk about a lot of the things that you're talking about, but what is this.

[00:02:00] Stand out the story for you this week, in terms of tech topics, what is the thing that, that burns in your mind about what you said? Yeah,

Craig Peterson: Burning a hole here. I think kind of a big one. We've got the obvious things were some real problems with security, but that's kind of almost every week. The one that really gets to me is this article.

That's talking about a AAA study. Now everybody knows who AAA is. They are as car folk, right. That you can drive. They used to have trip ticks. I remember making those up and taking the family on vacation. Now they've, they've kind of shifted a little bit, but they were looking at these adaptive cruise controls and basically what most people are calling self-driving car technology.

[00:03:00] And there've been some reports of these adaptive cruise control, this self-driving technology, driving people right into the rear of fire trucks, from which, of course, is not a fun thing to hit, of police cars and other things. So basically, they thought they would check it out a little bit, and then he tested a number of different vehicles and the way they tested them as they parked a balloon on the road.

A lot like a car and it was designed here now to give the car an object. So you're driving down the road with your adaptive cruise control on that car sitting there. Is it going to avoid it by changing lanes, by stopping? What's it going to do? And in almost all of the cases, these cars are rear-ended this car slash balloon that was sitting right there in the lane. I don't mean like it's two inches into the lane. I mean, it was right in the lane. To me, that is huge news because we have all been looking forward to good automation, which of course isn't here yet, but many of us have these adaptive cruise controls, Matt.

[00:04:00] Matt Gagnon: Right. I was going to say, this is already a technology that is in like a lot of Tesla cars and a lot of other places that have this adaptive sort of technology that, uh, that I think Lee makes a lot of people feel. Like if it's in the car and sellable to you right now that it's totally safe and you're fine.

And you can, you can just kinda like put it on cruise control almost and let it do the rest.

Craig Peterson: Yeah. So, it's not a hundred percent of the time. Some of the cars, like the BMW X7, stopped in one out of three runs and that new Kia Telluride, which is a gorgeous car. I hit the dummy vehicle in all three 30 mile-an-hour runs.

The problem appears to be that they have maps of the roads and it doesn't have that map doesn't have everything that's around the road. Of course, the surroundings are changing, and these cars seem to be assuming that if something is fixed. It's probably off of the road. It's probably a road sign except, or et cetera.

[00:05:00] And this is where the big arguments coming out now, are we better off having something like LIDAR on our cars, which is giving it a full three-D view. It can figure out if things are moving, where they are. In respect to you. Or go with what Tesla is doing because Elon Musk and Tesla are very heavily reliant on just cameras.

So, they don't use a three-D view. Yeah. So, what's going to work best and there still are some radar-based systems. And that's the check really from 10 to 20 years.

Matt Gagnon: And those things basically, I mean, they send out like a, almost a Doppler signal to see. Where things are and, and, and basically how physically close they are.

And they use, you know, the complex math system and the computers to try to judge the car's speed and angle and whatever, to try to make sure that, of course, it avoids things. It just, it strikes me as weird. That be the way that we want a car that is autonomous in some way to operate. Right. I mean, you want, you know, who cares if a stationary object is a sign or something else if it's on the curb of the road and you're about to run into it. You want a car to see that? I mean, think about it like a kid that's frozen or a deer that's not moving or, I mean, any number of things, right. You want to be able to judge where that thing actually is.

[00:06:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah, absolutely. So these adaptive cruise control. If you have it and you want to use it, what it is is good for is keeping you in the lane.

What is not good for it appears here from this study is avoiding accidents. By the way, Cadillac's super crew. Was it different than some of these other vehicles they tested from being BMW Ford, Kia and Subaru at its drivers only had to intervene about eight times and 800 miles of driving. So, it was actually pretty good.

So, these things are going to get better, but just don't trust the stuff itself.

[00:07:00] Matt Gagnon: Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over the world of technology, Craig, it would be remiss of me to not bring up Tik Tok with you here. I know that we've touched on and hovered around this topic a little bit, uh, you know, in previous weeks here, but you know, the president signed that executive order that basically threw the hammer down on the Chinese company.

Any part of Tik Tok as it operates in the United States? Um, I guess my question for you is, is twofold. Number one, exactly. How does it work? What, what they're, what that app is doing, and what is the real security concern, and then number two, what do you think of the executive order?

I mean, is that the appropriate action to be taking in this regard?

Craig Peterson: Yeah, we've got a couple of things we're looking at here. We have WeChat and Tik Tok, which are both equally effective money transactions were banned from these Chinese companies. So it's Bytedance and Tencent. Those are the names of the companies that own those technologies.

[00:08:00] Now, we have caught our friends at Tik Tok multiple times now getting information from our phones and stealing information from our phones. Particularly if your phone has been rooted, if you have jailbroken your phone, you have now opened up your phone to all kinds of evil, and we have caught Tik Tok doing that.

Tencent, this is really kind of scary here because this is, this is a bad thing for Tencent, but I talked about Tencent on my show a couple of months ago here, because what they were caught doing is putting code into windows operating system that allowed them 100% access to everything on your machine, from your keyboard and mouse.

Through every file on your machine. And Tencent said they did that in order to help stop cheating. Tencent has some of the most popular video games in use today in the United States. Tik Tok, of course, which is Bytedance has this wonderful little app. That's very, very addictive. And obviously the Chinese spent a lot of money on it.

[00:09:00] Is it worth doing? I can say. Absolutely. Yes. I was so disappointed the owners and CEOs of these big tech companies, testifying, I have personally seen right here, multiple companies throughout New England who are now clients of mine who had. Active Chinese back doors in their systems where the Chinese had stolen their intellectual property.

And in some cases, yeah, stolen every penny out of their operating accounts. So, is China a threat? 100%! Is it doing it? I have firsthand knowledge of them doing it in companies that are now my clients. And it puts businesses just completely out of business. Is Tik Tok a threat. Absolutely. The latest thing they were caught doing is capturing everything from your copy buffer. Is Tencent a threat? Are you kidding me having complete control over your computer without your knowledge? So you can play a video game. Yeah, I don't think President Trump went far enough.

[00:10:00] Matt Gagnon: There you go. Well, Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at this time to go over the world of technology as he always does.

And of course, as you heard just a few moments ago, he also has a show on Saturdays that you can hear as well. If you want to get any of these topics and so many more in more depth and detail, Craig, we really appreciate it as always. And we'll talk to you again very soon.

Craig Peterson: Hey, take care, Matt.

Matt Gagnon: Thanks a lot.

Alright, so coming up next. Sure.

Craig Peterson: Hey, thanks, guys. I appreciate you joining me today. I was spent time yesterday, a few hours with our video guy. We're going to do some more work today. And what I'm trying to do here is put together a bunch of well kind of classes, courses, and stuff. So I think what I'm going to do before really get into this too much is send out an email.

[00:11:00] To everybody kind of asking you. So what if you had the opportunity, what would you do? So, uh, or what you'd like me to do here for you? Uh, for instance, you want to become like, uh, my friend Guy who decided after a full career, pretty much he wanted to go into cybersecurity. Cause there are millions of open jobs, even right now there are jobs in cybersecurity, but you have to learn it.

So do you want me to teach you guys? More about cybersecurity. So you have more job security and job options. Would you like me to just kind of get you out of a hole that you might be in with your cybersecurity? What do I do? What are the basics? Then give me the basics or something in between. So let me know.

[00:12:00] I would love to know. Okay. Cause I really want to help you guys out. It's me M E @craigpeterson.com. So drop me an email. Now I'm going to do a lot of free training as well as some of the paid training. And obviously the free training is going to be kind of long-tail just on some specific narrow topics, but lots of them, cause I don't want to confuse people, but uh, how about a more professional sort of course.

So let me know. Again, Craig at Craig peterson.com. Take care, everybody. And we'll be back this weekend.

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