AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings News with Matt Gagnon: ISIS Fake Shopping Sites, FBI Seizure and Elon Musk Satellite Internet.

Good morning everybody!

I was on with Matt this morning and we had a good discussion about ISIS, Fake Shopping Sites, Terrorism, FBI Seizure. I discussed somethings to watch out for and then we talked about Elon Musk's Starlink that will bring high-speed internet to the northeast from a satellite constellation.  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:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Read them carefully and decide for yourself. Was this just a generic thing that was written and would apply to anything from a garden rake through books, through special gloves and the face mask. Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Mr. Matt. Gagnon this morning, we talked about some of the problems rural areas are having.

When it comes to back to school, and if you live outside of a big city, this frankly might be a problem for you too. We also had a little chat about some more details here. How can you be sure you are buying PPE from a reputable dealer? So all of that and more, here we go.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:45] We've got Craig Peterson. He's our tech guru. He joins us now as he always does every Wednesday to talk about these technology topics. Craig, are you with me?

Craig Peterson: [00:00:54] I am good morning, Matt.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:56] I think the, yeah, I'm great. Thanks for asking by the way. I think the topic of the day. The theme, if there was one is code with scams, I know that let me start off by asking about what ISIS is apparently doing, but the only COVID-19 scam or, so it's something that people are using to exploit.

This silly year that we're living in right now, Craig. So why don't we start off with that? COVID 19 PPE scam site.

Craig Peterson: [00:01:23] I don't know, 2020. This is one heck of a weird year. It turns out that as you mentioned ISIS, yeah, those guys, the terrorists that we've been fighting for a long time, they need the money and they've been raising money.

One of the ways this whole thing was money with bin Laden's family. Of course. So how do they make money nowadays? it turns out according to the justice department, one of the ways is this website called face mask center.com.  It's fun to think about this sort of thing. Of course, that site now is seized. If you go there, you'll get a seizure notice. If you went there beforehand and you bought some of these personal protective equipment pieces, they were selling like masks and Tyvek suits and you probably never received them. You also probably paid with cryptocurrency. Now that's a dead giveaway, Matt.

Matt Gagnon: [00:02:25] Yep.

It is true, but it's not the only COVID-19 scam out there, obviously. people are looking for this kind of thing right now and there's, there seems to be a lot of that kind of thing going around. I was looking at some stuff just a couple of weeks ago about just how many of these things are out there.

And by the way, Not just, PPE scams like this one. But, miracle cures and other things, people are setting up all kinds of things like that right now. Or they're not.

Craig Peterson: [00:02:49] Oh, absolutely. Just like in Pete's dragon people going around and selling snake oil.

Matt Gagnon: [00:02:54] Wow. Pete's Dragon. I haven't heard of that one in a while.

That's good, that's a good reference.

Craig Peterson: [00:02:57] Maine, right? COVID-19 scams are absolutely huge. There's a company out there. That's been keeping track of a lot of them called dark owl. And there's a security firm that there's a security firm. That's been trying to track it for a month. And they're seeing these seen a massive volume of these illegitimate materials, like PPE being sold, never delivered.

Massive problems with the quality of some of these masks, et cetera. In fact, California, the governor there ordered some as may be part of a payback scheme, by this sounds in some of the reports coming out, but they had to return all of those what's China going to do with all of it, some substandard stuff.

They've been selling it on all kinds of websites out there. So a couple of tips for listeners and Matt, we actually talked about this some months ago when you're online and you're shopping. Obviously you want to look for reviews. You want to look for ratings. You'll find those on the Amazon site. Now, there are only a few reviews.

You've got to be careful. But there are some things to look for in those reviews, whether it's E-bay or maybe even some other sites, one is their grammar, their diction, and their punctuation's terrible. If it's really bad, you've got to start wondering and then read them carefully and decide for yourself.

Was this just a generic thing that was written and would apply? To anything from a garden rake through special gloves and the face mask. And if it is, it's almost certainly one of these fake paid four ratings that we're finding is being used all over the internet today. So watch for bad grammar. Watch for ratings and comments and feedback that just don't apply specifically to whatever it is you're buying,

Matt Gagnon: [00:04:56] We're speaking with Craig Peterson. He is our tech guru. You can hear him on this very network, by the way, on Saturdays at one o'clock, he's got his own show where he goes into all of these stories and more in-depth in detail.

if you want to hear more and make sure you tune in on the weekend for Craig Peterson.

 This story is fascinating to me. I've actually been following this myself for a little bit because I think it's a really interesting technology. So SpaceX, right? I just saw that Elon Musk is now just a hair behind Zuckerberg and the wealth list.

And I think it's because of stuff like this, right? They're not just doing launches into space. They're doing something called Starling, which is going to be satellite-based internet service. and a lot of people who've had this kind of thing in the past or whatever. they wonder about speed.

So what exactly is this going to be in terms of internet speed? Is this going to be anything? Something that has a wire being plugged into my house?

Craig Peterson: [00:05:46] Oh, this is absolutely massive here, especially for us in the Northeast. Starlink is going to be, what's called a constellation of satellites. In fact, just last weekend they launched and another 50 or so satellites up there and there's 600 so far.

It's in beta test. Now they're saying that it will be a gigabit speed, which is absolutely massive. It's just an incredible amount of data speed.  it is going to also have low latency, at least relatively speaking. And we're talking 200 milliseconds where it gets geeky, but here's great news for us up here.

If you've been having trouble getting your internet and just this morning, you guys had a show or not a show. I mentioned of a lady, who's trying to get it for getting her kids back to school. It's a real problem right now.

You can go to their website. You can go to, again, it's called Starlink. You can go to starlink.com, S T a R L I N k.com. And you can sign up to be part of their beta test program that is going to cost you a dollar. For the first month. And that includes the satellite dish that they're going to send you with instructions on how to install it. Then month two in doubles, it goes up to $2 a month for what is looking to be right now about 50 megabits, which is a huge win for many of us out in rural areas.

So you'll get 50 megabits for two bucks a month while it's in beta testing.  If you go to Starlink dot com you can sign up. They are looking for beta testers. They're going to go through two rounds of beta tests. You may or may not be chosen, but frankly, the further you are out in the wild the better for you. Yeah.

Matt Gagnon: [00:07:47] You know the thing about this too, this is one of those things, and I apologize for getting up on my soapbox about this when you are challenged like Maine is with a lot of rural areas that don't have broadband delivery. Some people who live in towns that have, 12 people in them and, and just don't have that kind of infrastructure available to them.

You have people who are in government all the time saying we need to find a way to bring rural broadband to the end. We're going to spend tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, extending out all this internet service to these really remote areas for not very many customers, to, just as an applause line or as an agenda item or whatever.

And they're going to spend all this money and then what's going to happen is something like this will come around. there are other things in development. It's not just this. there's those, the balloon internet that I think Zuckerberg was all freaking out. What about before and other things, right?

They could come and deliver it in a night in a nanosecond, just something like that it's developed and released and boom, all of that hundreds of millions of dollars of investment is completely worthless.

Craig Peterson: [00:08:45] In the tech world, we've been seeing this sort of thing for a long time. The government is really good at spending other people's money. It is not good at picking winners. And when we're talking about winners here, I was like, this could be a very big win. And when we think about it, get right down to it. Investors, these angel investors that are professionally investing in technology companies. If they're lucky, one out of their 10 investments pans out of think about how terribly the federal government has done investing in technologies, such as batteries and solar and others, where in fact, they have invested in some of the biggest losers ever. We've already lost billions of dollars by them doing that.

So I think you're right. This is going to be rolling out SpaceX isn't the only one that's going to have one of these satellite Constance constellations. Work orbit that it's going to provide us with coverage. Ultimately, we're going to see our cell phones, our smartphones, whatever these things are going to be called we're going to see them directly linking to various constellations up there.

So yeah, don't rush out to spend billions on this.

Matt Gagnon: [00:09:59] Yeah. good advice. Craig Peterson, our tech guru. Once again, you can hear him on the weekend here on WGAN. You can hear a lot of these topics and more in more detail. Thanks a lot, Craig. Appreciate it as always. And we'll talk again soon.

Craig Peterson: [00:10:11] Take care, Matt.

Matt Gagnon: [00:10:12] All right,

coming up next. Let's talk to everybody. We will be, of course, doing a full show. This weekend. I've been videotaping the last one, three or four shows as well as we work on this site to try and make this a bit more of a video show. So I think this is going to be fun. Hey, let me know by the way.

 I'm trying to figure this out. Would it make sense for me to post these as video podcasts on the same feed that you're listening to me now or strictly audio? I know a lot of the platforms only support audio.

So I'm thinking maybe this would end up being a completely different thing that I posted maybe on Facebook or. Oh on YouTube or other places, but send me a quick note. [email protected]. I'd love to hear from you like to know what's going on.

Alright, everybody, take care and we'll talk again on the weekend. Bye-bye.

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