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Welcome! Amazon Marketplace and third-party sellers plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN

Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity

Release Date: 09/18/2020

The Time They Once Hacked Our Routers to Patch Them

Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity

The FBI, CIA, NSA, CISA and others issued a warning about active AI-driven attacks on American critical infrastructure. Craig, who ran the FBI's InfraGard online training program, explains what's actually exposed: old controllers that open and close valves, set flow rates, decide how much acid or base goes into the water — many of them reachable directly from the internet, on networks that have been comprehensively mapped for years. Several water systems have already been shut down; one town lost power along with its water. Josh, who works InfraGard in his own homeland security practice,...

Five Federal Agencies, One Warning — and an Argument About the Singularity

Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity

The NSA, CISA, the FBI, the Department of Energy and the EPA put out a joint advisory last Wednesday, and the language is unusually direct: AI dramatically reduces the technical skill and the time required to attack industrial control systems. Those controllers run public works. A great many of them are reachable from the internet, and their locations are not a secret. That sets up the larger conversation. Ray Kurzweil wrote The Singularity Is Near twenty years ago, predicting broadly human-level machine intelligence by 2029 and human-machine integration by 2045. Elon Musk and others now say...

People Would Rather Live Next to a Nuclear Plant Than a Data Center

Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity

Matt opens with a poll finding he calls one of the great PR failures of our time: people would rather have a nuclear power plant built next door than a data center. Pennsylvania's governor has now signed legislation that effectively stops data centers unless they clear a long approvals process. Craig's answer isn't a defense of data centers so much as a description of what a few counties actually did. They said yes — on conditions. Generate your own power, and 20% more than you use, fed back into our grid. And pay full property tax, none of the abatement deals. It worked well enough that...

1,140 Ransomware Attacks on Industry in One Quarter — 740 of Them Manufacturing

Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity

The numbers carry this segment. Eleven hundred forty ransomware attacks on industrial companies in a single quarter, 740 of them against manufacturers. A recent Patch Tuesday carrying about 570 fixes. An Apple advisory telling anyone whose machine touches a coffee-shop network to update now. Craig's point is narrower and more useful than the headline count. Windows Update patches Microsoft software, and not all of it. The average computer is running roughly 60 other programs it never looks at. Older versions of ordinary things — Adobe Reader is the one he names — are what attackers are...

Fixing Jeff's Wi-Fi, Live On the Air

Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity

Jeff's studio Wi-Fi had been misbehaving for weeks, so this segment became a clinic — and one you can follow along with on your own network, because Craig has Jeff run the test live. The two bands do different jobs. 2.4 GHz travels farther and gets through walls and windows better, but it carries only a few channels, so in an apartment building or a dense neighborhood your neighbors are stepping on you. 5 GHz has the room but not the reach. Anything older than about ten years doesn't have the choice, and Wi-Fi 6, 7 and the coming 8 handle the congestion far better than what came before. Then...

Why Deleting a File on an iPhone Is Different — and How the Senate Got Fauci's Texts Anyway

Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity

When you erase an iPhone and it finishes in a second, nothing was erased. The phone destroyed the encryption key. Craig explains the layer most people miss: every individual file has its own key, so deleting one file destroys that file's key and the contents can never be recovered — unlike Windows, where a deleted file usually sits there waiting for recovery software. Which raises the obvious question about a phone with very few contacts left on it. The answer is mobile device management, the same category of software Craig runs for his clients. MDM lets a central authority control which...

The Same Dollar Shows Up Five or Six Times in AI's Revenue

Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity

Two independent testing firms reported more cases of Anthropic's and OpenAI's most advanced models compromising third-party systems. Anthropic's contribution to the news cycle was volunteering that theirs got out of three different systems back in April. Craig explains why the fix is harder than it sounds. These are associative machines — running through branches to pick the next best word, across chipsets holding thousands of small processors, in a structure deliberately modeled on the brain. We know how to build it and how to feed it. We do not know what happens in the middle. So you...

Two AI Labs Are Arguing About Whose Model Escaped First

Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity

OpenAI's high-end model, under test, ended up breaking into Hugging Face. Then Anthropic said theirs had gotten out three times back in April. Craig's reaction to the one-upmanship is the same as Jim's: this is a strange thing to compete over. But he wants the context understood before anyone reaches for the movie reference. Nobody told these systems to escape. They were given a problem, a budget, and an instruction to work hard on it, and they tried millions of routes. One route was a machine with internet access. That is not a mind waking up — and, as Craig points out, air-gapping ends it....

Jeff Asks the Best Question Anyone Has Asked Craig About AI

Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity

Jeff stops Craig mid-explanation and asks him to dumb it down. If AI is a large language model — if all it does is pick the most likely next word — how does that thing get into a company's computers? Is it just guessing the next digit of a password? Craig's answer is the clearest explanation he has given on air. It started as a language model, literally which word tends to follow which, good enough to produce something that reads as human. What it became is an associative machine, and association isn't limited to words. The same pattern-matching that strings a sentence together recognizes...

It Was Told to Research Competitors. It Hacked Hugging Face.

Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity

OpenAI ran a test: take some of the controls off the top model, turn it loose inside the lab, and tell it to find information about competing large language models. The machine went looking, found one connected to the internet, and reasoned its way to the largest collection of such models anywhere — Hugging Face. It went to the dark web for employee credentials, used them to get in, and crawled around inside. Hugging Face noticed the load on their servers and assumed an attack — but nothing was going after accounts or credit cards. It only wanted model information. Craig's point is that...

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Welcome!

Craig explains third-party sellers on Amazon and why it is not all it is being made up to be and why?

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

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] You've probably been shopping online and some of these retailers include some of the biggest ones out there have been price, gouging, us, and shipping defective products. We'll talk about who and why and what you can do.

Hey, welcome back everybody. Craig Peterson here, he listening to news radio 98.5 FM and AM 560 thanks for joining us today. You might also be listening online@craigpeterson.com and you can find me on most major podcasting platforms out there.

So welcome. Welcome. So glad to have y'all here.

Online shopping, right? It's a pretty big deal. It has been growing a lot. I'm looking at some stats here, statistics and in 2014 online shopping accounted for about 1.3. trillion dollars in sales. That's a lot of money, isn't it, online? So that was six years ago. Last year, it more about tripled to $3.5 trillion. And 2020 is expected to be $4.2 trillion. So, up about what, 20% from last year, it might even be higher than that. I think just because so many of us are shopping online, and it's probably going to hit about 7 trillion within the next three or four years. It's absolutely amazing.

We're talking about 2 billion online shoppers. There are roughly almost 8 billion people in the world and just over a quarter of them are online shoppers, almost 5% of people shop online at least once per month. Some great stats here, put together on sleek note.com, I am running through. 63.3% of shopping journeys start online. We've known that for a long time. So no matter whether or not you have a hard goods store or not, most people, 63% are starting online, and then they're going into the stores.

About half of eCommerce sales are made through mobile devices this year, about half 49.2%. 54% of eCommerce sales are going to be made through mobile devices as of next year. Mobile devices are at, by the way. It's why, if you have a business website, you need to make sure you are mobile-first in this day and age, not desktop first. But look at who's going to your site, like my site at Craig Peterson.com. My statistics show me that most people, 60 to 70% are going to Craig peterson.com from their desktops, not from mobile devices. I'm still a desktop-first kind of website, but you have to account for those mobile users.

Amazon accounts for almost half of all US eCommerce sales this year, 47% and it's going by next year. It's going to account for about half of all of us sales. 80% of online shoppers and 63% of mobile shoppers think that new technologies and innovations will improve their experience. Online shopping, I don't think anyone can deny is a very big thing. If you're a business and you don't have a great online presence, you got to pull up your socks.

I've got to say, I do not have a great online presence and I am in the process of pulling up my socks. Okay. I have been working pretty hard on redoing it and I had hoped I have the new site up by last weekend, but it wasn't.

I'm not going to promise it'll be up this weekend either. Everything takes longer. We just had some of the other things going on. We've got a new customer out there right now, and we're busy with them. Multiple installations and multiple sites here. Try and tighten up their security. So cobbler's kids.

What we're going to talk about right now are price gouging and defective products.

Did you know that about half of the products that are being shipped out right now through Amazon are from what's called Amazon Marketplace? The Amazon marketplace is third party companies that are selling using Amazon's technology. So Amazon will charge them a percentage. Amazon will stock their product and charge them for the inventory, the space in the racks, et cetera. Then Amazon will try and sell it to you and then ship it to you. You may not be aware of that, but the problem that we're seeing right now is that many of these third-party marketplace companies are bad actors, is what Amazon calls them. And that's true.

They are bad actors, according to Amazon. In a corporate blog post, they said we have suspended more than 3,900 selling accounts in our US store alone for violating our fair pricing policies. We've been partnering directly with law enforcement agencies to combat price gougers and hold them accountable.

Between May and August, Public Citizen found that ordinary antibacterial hand soap, which usually sells for around a buck and a half was going for $7. That's how almost a 500% pricing increase for antibacterial hand soap. They also found instances of markups of a thousand percent or more on things like disposable face masks, they were selling for $40 instead of $4.

Cornstarch selling for $9 instead of 90 cents. So it's a big deal here, but the report is also saying something interesting. It's troubling that so much effort was put into blaming third-party sellers, but so little effort was made to stop the price increases including on the product sold by Amazon directly.

Amazon is not merely a victim in the price gouging on its marketplace, it is a perpetrator. Interesting report.

There are other reports. There's one that was released this week by US PIR G found that erratic pricing for staples, things like paper towels, Kleenex, flour, bleach is still persisting over there on Amazon. So you'll find that@uspirg.org. I'm not actually sure what that stands for, but they are watching consumer pricing and trying to protect consumers according to their website. So it's really interesting what's going on.

Now, personally, I don't have as much of a problem with what they're calling price gouging as other people do. If the demand goes up, the price goes up. If the price goes up, the profit goes up over the profit goes up. More people are going to get into that business, which is going to drive the price down. That's just the way it has always worked. Now they call it capitalism, but it's been the way that people have interacted with other people since the Dawn of time, when someone traded a rock for another rock, or a leg off of a lamb for a few chickens. It's just the way it has worked and always worked.

So I would rather, for instance, these guys and gals and have generators. If I've been storing generators for two or three years, and I have them and they're not being sold very quickly because nobody needs them. But now there is a massive power outage. I have these generators, but it's cost me money to store them. Or let's say I have to ship them up from Florida. So now I have to pay the trucking costs. Plus the higher cost of the generators in Florida. Why should I not be able to pass that along to the consumer? If I can't pass along to consumers, guess what? I'm not shipping generators up from Florida or water down to Florida after a hurricane, from New England, because I can't recoup my costs. This is a difficult thing. So keep an eye out when you're shopping online. Even at Amazon, compare it with Walmart.com.

They're trying to make a huge hit against our friends over at Amazon and they're doing a good job.

All right, we're going to talk about ransomware.

You're listening to Craig Peterson right here on WGAN.

We'll be right back.

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