Welcome! Business Virtual Reality plus more on this Tech Talk with Craig Peterson Podcast

Welcome!

Virtual Reality is no longer just for gamers.  It is now a business tool that is coming to your home office.

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

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Traders set to don virtual reality headsets in their home offices

What's on Your Enterprise Network? You Might Be Surprised

Malware Attacks Declined But Became More Evasive in Q2

One of this year’s most severe Windows bugs is now under active exploit

The VPN is dying, long live zero trust

Shopify's Employee Data Theft Underscores Risk of Rogue Insiders

Microsoft boots apps out of Azure used by China-sponsored hackers

WannaCry Has IoT in Its Crosshairs

Love in the time of Zoom: Why we’re in the midst of a dating revolution

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Massive changes ahead. We've even got traders who used to be on the floor of the stock exchange and on the floor of these massive financial companies, we've even got them at home. Now you're going to be shocked at what they're doing to replace that interaction.

Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. We're going to be talking about these traders and how virtual reality headsets have changed the way some of them are doing business. We're going to talk about what's on your enterprise network. I talked about this last week.

Hopefully, you got my email, it came out on Wednesday this week. I'm going to try and do two of these a week. It's three minute little a coaching lesson if you will, on security. This week we talked about your enterprise network. We're going to delve into that more today.

Have a look in your email make sure you got that. I know you're used to getting emails from me Saturday mornings. This last weekend we sent our weekly email on Sunday instead of Saturday, I'm not sure if that's better for you guys or not. We certainly didn't have quite as many people open it as usual.

Usually, it's almost half of everybody that's on the list and that's thousands of people open it but not as good on Sunday. We may switch back to Saturday. We'll see.

It also has to do with our time, right? This is a labor of love, trying to get all this information out to everybody. So things can change.

We're going to talk about some big changes. Changes in malware attacks this year, even though the decline a little bit in Q2. They got more potent, and we'll tell you why what's going on years.

Most severe of Windows bugs is now under active exploit. We'll tell you about that. VPNs are dying. You know what my thinking is about these paid VPN and free VPN services. If you've been listening long enough, right? They do not increase your security. In fact, they decrease your security in some ways. Maybe you're going to stop your local ISP from tracking where you're going online, but you're you overall are much less secure.

 Shopify. We've got a huge theft of the hair and turns out it kind of employees involved. We've got Microsoft booting more Chinese sponsored hackers out.

Wanna Cry. That yeah yeah, that same one that brought the country and the world to its knees a couple of years ago. It's back. And love in the time of Zoom. So if I don't get to all of these today, make sure you check online, or if you're going to miss part of this, all of that available there, Craig peterson.com. We're trying to make sure all of the audio is up there so that you can listen to it in your time on any podcast app. Make sure you check it out, whatever your favorite app is.

Technology has really changed everything and we have seen that this year, they expect to be just an incredible online shopping season. Now that's good and that's bad. You've got the local stores who are hurting very badly. I have gone out of my way lately to try and go to a local store as opposed to ending up online and buying stuff because I want to support them. They are part of the economy, obviously. They are where my kids got some of the first jobs, in local stores. They are also the place where I can go to see things and play with things. It's not like where Amazon charges me sometimes to return something. That wasn't what I thought it was. That kind of always bothered me. So I like the local merchants and not just the restaurants, but the guys that sell the little electronic gear that we have and other things, but it's going to be a huge year this year.

We're going to talk later on today, this is kind of low on the list, but virtual online Zoom dating.  It is really changing at all. Now we have a story that came up from Ars Technica this week, Owen Walker of the Financial Times, talking about how we have moved our businesses into spare bedrooms in our homes, living rooms and we've talked about this before.

If you're working from home, make sure you have a spot where all you ever do is work from home. The brain kind of ends up associating and you can become much more productive that way. Different parts of the room, maybe a different chair. Maybe all you do is turn the chair around just to let your brain know that it is time to get to work.

 I also use some apps. I've got vitamin R that I've used and I don't really use it as much anymore. I've kind of grown disciplined over the years. You might check it out online. Vitamin R. It uses the Pomodoro Technique, which is an Italian name. Remember those little tomato clocks or countdown timers you have in the kitchen, or at least you used to have years ago where it just reminds you, Hey, uh, you're supposed to be working right now cause you're hearing it go tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, and then it goes off and okay, well, my 20 minutes is up for this particular task and then you take a brief few minute breaks and then you get right back to it.

There are all kinds of hacks to help us to be more productive when we're at home and ultimately more productive than maybe in the office in some ways. In other ways, you're not as productive and you're not as productive because you're not around these other people who can come over and ask questions and much of what we learn, much of what we do is just incidental communications. Where we are in a hallway, we bump into someone or we go to a meeting, we have a side discussion. That's hard to do when you're on a WebEx team call because you're there and so are 10 other people, two other people. It doesn't really matter how many other people, because you can't just lean over and say, Hey, what do you think of this or that?

Now, obviously, on the WebEx teams, you can go ahead and type a message, right? You have that chat capability and you can send it to a specific person. You can do that on Zoom as well, but I don't. I'm not going to talk about Zoom right now because you should not be using it for business. Just you really, really should not.

So focus on that ability to communicate. Some companies are now going to happy hours online, and I've been invited to a Zoom happy hour, and the company's sending me three little bottles of wine. We're going to do it. Taste-testing and we'll just kind of chat while we're there online. It should be fun. It'll be interesting too.

Many businesses are doing that as well. They have the little happy hours and get-togethers because you're not going out after work for a drink to talk to people. You're not going out in the hallway and talking to people. It is such a different world.

The whole thing with whether or not you're there physically is a whole other problem when it comes to traders. Think about traders. If you've seen some of these movies or TV shows where they're on the floor, I know Fox business and some of these other business channels have a shot with a camera on the floor, the trading floor and there just aren't the people there that they used to be. But it's again, it's the interaction and that's what's been important in the past.

Some banks UBS particularly has been issuing some of its traders over in London. These halolenses from Microsoft. These are virtual reality headsets and the idea behind this is to allow the staff to recreate the experience of working in a packed trading floor without ever leaving their homes. I don't know if you saw the video or pictures of this, but when Microsoft first introduced these virtual reality headsets, they had issued them to everybody who was in attendance at this conference room and they started playing these videos. So you see all these people looking around, of course, they can't see beyond what's right in front of their eyes, which is this halolens. These virtual lenses and they're looking around and right up the aisle walks Bill Gates, of course, nobody notices him because he can't see him. They're all just caught up in this experience.

That's what they're trying to do. Banks have been really desperate to bring workers back into the office. When you're talking about these regulatory sensitive roles or roles involving money, where banks will typically force employees to take vacations, which you should be doing. If you're a business person and you have a bookkeeper accountant, make sure they take a vacation, make sure they get out, and have somebody else fill in for them. That's going to help catch people who might be cheating with money. They really want to get these people back in. Trading is one of these, but because people are afraid of the Wuhan virus, they don't want to go into the office. So what they've done, and this is really cool, I'm looking at a picture of her right now is they've set it up so that the traders can be sitting there in their homes and it looks like they have a bunch of different screens. You've seen this before, right where they have four or five, six screens in front of them, different data on different screens. They can look over, they can pull up a screen, they can see everything out of the corner of their eye, just like they're used to. So I can see our market rise or drop in something. I think it's really cool. And that's a good use of that technology.

Deutsche Bank, by the way, told its New York staff last week that they were not required to return to the office until mid 20, 21.

Deutsche bank's going to be opening a whole new office. Many of these others are doing it as well so we'll see what happens.

This Halolens by Microsoft was new surely seen as a gaming device and these headsets cost three grand. Many companies using them as a communications tool.  you might want to look at it as well, depending on your business and what you are doing.

So coming up, we're going to talk about what's on your enterprise network. What's on the network, your house. You really might be surprised.

You're listening to Craig Peterson.

Stick around because we'll be right back.

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