AS HEARD ON - The Jim Polito Show - WTAG 580 AM: Black Friday Deals -- Not so Much, Safer to Buy Pizza than Vote!

Welcome!

Good morning, everybody. I was on WTAG this morning with Jim Polito.  We discussed Why I think it is safer to buy pizza than to Vote.  Then we got into the lack of deals this Black Friday and Cyber Monday and why it pays to shop around. Here we go with Jim.

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

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning, and we talked about the dominion voting systems. Did you know, your vote is not as safe as buying a pizza?

We went into that. the reason why I'm really upset with the way this whole software is set up is it's just craziness.

We talked a little bit about whether or not, you should actually be shopping on Black Friday. There are a lot of changes this year. So here we go with Mr. Polito.

Jim Polito: [00:00:33] Here he is. Always great to have him here and even though as a Canadian, he already had a Thanksgiving back in October. He joins us now leading into Thanksgiving, a lot of important stuff on the plate.

How about the Dominion voting system? But before that, How about his recommendation that you don't shop on Black Friday? Whoa, joining us now. Our good friend and tech talk guru. Craig Peterson. Good morning.

Craig Peterson: [00:01:03] Hey, good morning, Jim. It is one of those mornings. Isn't it?

Jim Polito: [00:01:08] It is. I want to get to the dominion thing, which is important.

It's relevant with the election, the president's complaints, but, you don't want me to shop on Black Friday? Is this a, just an ethical thing, a moral thing, or is this a Jim, I can save you more money thing?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:26] First of all, there's Cyber Monday, which of course people are now familiar with, which is the Monday after Black Friday.

And the deals are really interesting this year. I don't know what you want to blame it on, whether it's been some of the lockdown stuff or something else. The deals have been there all along. But this year, it looks like many of these retailers are looking to make up the difference of the money they lost because of us just not shopping anymore.

And they are not giving us these deals. They used to, in fact, these online deals now are. Pretty hard to come by.

Jim Polito: [00:02:03] Ah, so it's not so novel anymore, right? Oh

Craig Peterson: [00:02:09] Yeah. That's a really good way to put it. Yeah, I liked that.

Jim Polito: [00:02:12] So now they're just going to stick it to us through the whole thing.

Craig Peterson: [00:02:17] You also want to look at companies like Amazon. Amazon is expected to be a big winner this year, and so is our Walmart and some of the others.

But if you look at Amazon and look at their prices, people just assume that you're going to get the best price, the best value by shopping at Amazon. It certainly is probably the most convenient, especially if you pay that extra a hundred and change right every year to Amazon.

As it turns out, those deals that you're seeing on many of these sites, Amazon included aren't so hot. You really have to do comparison shopping.

Jim Polito: [00:02:58] Ah, I see that,

Hey, Our folks who do the financial exchange showed on TAG and HYN. Barry Armstrong told me a while ago, you know what, Jim, you should comparison shop when you're online shopping.

And I said, other than Amazon, he said, try Walmart. He said Walmart is really making an effort. For the things that Walmart stocks, there are times you can beat Amazon, and if you order enough, you get free shipping. He's right.

Craig Peterson: [00:03:26] Yeah, absolutely. And with Cyber Monday this year, again, we are expecting even better deals than we will be seen on Black Friday.

Compare, make sure you've got that budget line down, obviously the normal don't fall into the hole of running up some of your credit cards.  Look online is a great place to go. You probably also want to visit some of these local retailers. It's a shame to see all of these stores closing, but frankly, the majority of us will be shopping online this year.

It's like over 80%.

Jim Polito: [00:04:00] Wow. I remember years ago having conversations following the holidays and it'd be like, Oh, 20% of people shopped online, like this, and now the whole thing has flipped. COVID pushed it over the edge, but the whole thing was flipping.

Craig Peterson: [00:04:16] Yeah, it is flipped in a very big way.

Many of us, me included. We just go to Amazon and buy something. it's just so easy. My family. And as we've got a couple of kids. we, every year we have a gift exchange and rather than everybody buying something for everybody cause there was 10 of us. plus now the grandkids and the spouses, we have one of these sites that you just put everybody's name in and it goes ahead and split them up and says, okay, you've got stocking, you've got the main gift or this particular person and that site is free.

But here's how that works. You do some research using this site and they list here's what I want for Christmas sort of a thing. And they now get a commission on anything that you're buying. Via their sites. So every link that you click on, every gift that's in there tends to be with Amazon and they make over there one to 3% on every gift.

There's just not a big amount of money, but it's enough for them to have a whole business just based on that.

Jim Polito: [00:05:28] Wow. Wow.

All right. Let's get to, now that we've done the shopping, we've got our shopping out of the way we got to get down and dirty.

We've heard a lot about Dominion. This is the system for voting, that the president and his allies have pointed out is easily hacked and is not good. And, you've actually uncovered some more stuff about it.

Craig Peterson: [00:05:55] This is frankly, to me, the biggest indication of how bad this stuff is, but, I professionally do computer security, network security all the way from a little pizza shop, right by the studio. In fact, there's one all the way through the department of defense contractors.

So I see all of this security stuff. I see it almost every day, right? Yeah. And w here's the very basic level right there. There's the DOD and then there's a pizza shop. On the other side, the pizza shop, anybody that accepts credit cards has to comply with what is called the PCI standard, which is the payment card industry.

So you have to have certain security in place, no matter what kind of business you are, if you are taking credit cards. And if you don't, there are massive fines that come from the payment card industry. that contract, I don't know if you checked it, but it's over 400 pages long that you sign\ just to take credit cards. Okay.

So just taking credit cards. So let's look at the requirements for PCI. There are 12 basic requirements on security to accept credit cards. Okay. and you look down this list of them and you compare it with our friends over dominion voting system. And they fail our voting systems that were used in so many States, including here in the Northeast, that system is not compliant with 10 of the 12 controls. In other words, it's failing 10 of them, basic ones.

This is a little slimy if you ask me because there's a comparison that I looked at here from the Gateway Pundit, and they looked at HOA voting software and HOA  voting software is fully PCI compliant, right? These are just basic things you need to be compliant with us to run a pizza shop. Okay.

Yet the $800,000 that our States have paid dominion, that software 800,000 is far less secure than the $800 HOA voting software. So it's a shame, of course, Elizabeth Warren or Senator, she wrote a letter complaining about that.

Jim Polito: [00:08:27] So the liberals back then and the left and the anti-Trump crowd. They were all on board saying this system is bad and now all of a sudden. No problem, nothing to see here, folks.

And on top of all of that, we have the NSA and these other organizations saying, we have no evidence of any hacking. Everything was okay.

How deeply did you look? Did you look all the way down to every single local system? I'm not suggesting that there was some overreaching, conspiracy with, worldwide conspiracy, has been inferred. How about just a local little conspiracy? Do you know what I mean? In one or two precincts that's sometimes all it takes.

Craig Peterson: [00:09:15] Yeah. And just real quick here are the Fails for dominion software. No firewall that's required by PCI. They do not have password protection in place here. Many of these systems are sharing even the same password. Data dumps or private voter data are possible on this. Encrypted transmitted data. In most cases, these things were not hooked up to the internet, but in some precincts they were.

Jim Polito: [00:09:45] Yeah.

Craig Peterson: [00:09:46] No antivirus. They don't have proper controls in place for updating the software. And we heard about that right? The night before the election, all of a sudden their software getting pushed out. Restricted data access failed, the whole concept of the need to know. Many people external even to the secretary of state's office have access to some of this data. Unique IDs for access.

Restricted physical access. Create and maintain access logs. The logs on these systems can be altered by anybody with an administrative password.

Jim Polito: [00:10:21] Wow.

Unbelievable. that's heavy-duty. That's heavy-duty and these are the things that people need to, keep in mind. Do you know what I mean?

Like when you're talking about all these systems are okay and this and that. It isn't okay.  I love your analogy of, yeah you want to do business and had to take your credit card, 400-page contract. Compared to the dominion system something more important than a simple financial transaction.

And it doesn't even come close to the protections that no, it just doesn't. It's crazy.

Every time you want to do something, it's voter intimidation. It's not. But it's the most important thing we all do.

Craig Peterson: [00:11:07] It's true. and it's apparently running windows seven, scan and touch it for vulnerabilities.

No, it's gone years with the same security issues nothing's been done. This is absolutely crazy. What the heck's going on. Yeah.

Jim Polito: [00:11:25] Craig, this has been fascinating. And our Craig Peterson folks has a show every Sunday at 11:00 AM on WTAG, WHYN Craig, in the meantime, we want to wish you a very happy Thanksgiving to everyone in your family. I hope everyone is safe, but, How can folks get in touch with you?

If you have a question, you can always email me Me@craigpeterson dot com or all of this stuff ends up on my website at craigpeterson.com. And you can subscribe right there. You'll get my weekly newsletter.

I've been sending out show notes and more recently every week, got a little training tidbit, two to three minutes to run through to help you understand your home computer and your business computers, what you should be doing.

So just. Craig peterson.com.

All right, Craig. Thank you very much. And I look forward to catching up with you after the holiday

alright

Craig Peterson: [00:12:20] and you have a great Thanksgiving too, Jim.

Jim Polito: [00:12:22] Thank you, Craig. All Craig Peterson, everybody.

Craig Peterson: [00:12:25] Oh, and by the way, as my little Roomba is cleaning up here in this studio. Hey, I want to thank everybody for listening and wish you a great Thanksgiving time with you and your family, I'll be on the radio again tomorrow morning, but I'm not sure we'll get this out in time. So if not, or even if we do. I appreciate you guys  I really do. You help make this all worthwhile.

Take care. Talk to you probably tomorrow. Bye-bye.

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