How Will the Next Power Failure Affect Your Life? Hackers, or Nature. Both Will Result in Death.

[As heard on WGAN 2021-06-30]

From man-caused like hackers through the environmental causes, like the sun, we could lose power. We've got a heat waves. We've got cold weather. We've got everything in between. What happens if we lose power, what do we need to do? That's what I discussed this morning with Mr. Matt Gagnon

[00:00:24] Matt Gagnon: [00:00:24] Craig Peterson joins us every Wednesday at this time to go over what's happening in the world of technology.

[00:00:29] He also joins this very station on Saturday. And talks about many of these very same issues in more depth of detail. Craig, welcome back to the program. Nice to have you as always, sir.

[00:00:39]Craig Peterson: [00:00:39] Hey, thanks. Glad to be here in such a nice or arm day, you said this tongue in his cheek.

[00:00:45] Matt Gagnon: [00:00:45] I believe oppressive heat is the word you press.

[00:00:47]Craig Peterson: [00:00:47] I grew up in in Canada and part of it was Northern Canada and the 70 degree day was like summertime. So my blood, I don't know my hips historically. I did the whole thing with the, the DNA in tracing ancestry. It's all from Northern. But you've Norwegian, et cetera. I think I am one of those minorities that is really heavily oppressed and should probably be getting free air conditioning.

[00:01:17] Cause my blood is just too, I don't know, sick, I guess for this.

[00:01:20] Matt Gagnon: [00:01:20] Yeah. I'm very sympathetic to you, Greg. And I think it does. I would say dovetail nicely into the question I was planning to ask you about. During heat waves here, that we've had so many different infrastructure attacks, hackers are getting into our energy.

[00:01:33] Great. And whatnot. That could be a bit of a deadly combination in the middle of a heat wave. Could it not? I would be concerned. I learned about that if I had your stick blood. So what should we all be concerned about as it relates to our security, as in, in terms of our energy grid end.

[00:01:47]Craig Peterson: [00:01:47] We need to spend some serious money.

[00:01:50] Think of that collapse that has happened down in Florida of that condo building. And the fact is that they had to spend millions to fix that building. In fact, it was like $120,000 per rev. Our grid, our electric grid, our water stations need the same type of investment. We have to tighten this stuff up because as you pointed out, we're seeing people dying right now because of the heat and the lack of air conditioning.

[00:02:23] Look at our grid. How many times has been attacked? And the problems that have come from it. Plus of course the whole nature thing which could destroy our grid would just one nasty solar flare. And we really have a combination of things that could cause serious damage. So if our enemies decide what they want to do is just.

[00:02:46] All kinds of confusion, people dying from the heat and in the wintertime, of course, also from the cold, they have the ability to shut down our grids. We really need to focus in on this. The price of electricity is going to go up even more if they do this, but it's an absolute necessity. Cause remember.

[00:03:09] Harrington event, which happened in the mid 18 hundreds, where there was a massive solar flare and it hit us here in the United States in a very bad way. But back then, it was just the, the Telegraph machines, one of those events, like the Harrington event happening now would put us back in the 18 hundreds for months and possibly years for some parts of this country, because we can't.

[00:03:36] Protect ourselves adequately from even that let alone the hackers out. There

[00:03:41] Matt Gagnon: [00:03:41] it is. Craig Peterson who joins us, he's our tech guru. And we hear from him every single Wednesday at this very time to talk over the world of technology. Another thing I've noticed too, spinning off into a totally different direction.

[00:03:53] Craig has obviously the criticism of, and hatred of. The big tech companies continues to grow. I think, and what's interesting about it is that there's a lot of distrust and dislike of them in a bipartisan way, right? There's a there's Republicans that don't like them, obviously because of the free speech issue.

[00:04:09] And there's a lot of left wing folks who also don't like them for entirely unrelated issues and reasons. But now there's a house committee which has approved a bill that could potentially break up Amazon, apple, Google, et cetera. What is

[00:04:22] Craig Peterson: [00:04:22] this all about? Yeah, this is a very big deal because these big tech companies keep getting bigger and they use techniques.

[00:04:31] The key competitors out of the marketplace and the techniques include buying companies that are worth tens of millions of dollars for a billion dollars, just so they don't have any competition. So we have this bill that was approved called the ending platform. Monopolies. Which came out with true bipartisan support came out of that committee.

[00:04:56] And the question is, what do you do, Matt? These companies are really doing things that are not technically against the antitrust act, so that we have act here in the S. But in reality, are it certainly by the spirit of that law because they are keeping competition out. Now, I would like to say that the free market would take care of this, but again, we don't really have a free market.

[00:05:26] And also the amount of control these people have is such that their profit margins are insane. Every one of these. Tech companies we're talking about. And then I include apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon. Every one of them has billions of dollars in cash sitting there in the bank to keep them. In that position.

[00:05:50] So it reminds me of the robber barons way back when the late 18 hundreds, early 19 hundreds, the controlled so many of our industries here in the United States, they cause the antitrust laws to be put into place. Something has to be done. And yeah. I just don't know, Matt I'm not somebody who really trusts government any more than I trust to any of these big tech companies.

[00:06:15]Matt Gagnon: [00:06:15] It's a question of who do you hate more right in the end of the day. All right. Final question for you, Greg. I'd like to go in this direction because we heard about John McAfee, recently passed away under not at all suspicious circumstances. Epstein didn't kill himself by the way.

[00:06:29]McAfee of course is the Titan nor was the Titan, the originator of a big antivirus software company, which many of us have had installed on our computers against our will and had to deal with in some way. Antivirus software is in and of itself interesting. Cause I was just reading somewhere that a lot of antivirus software actually misses.

[00:06:48] A gigantic amount of malware that ends up being on computers. Is this a problem? And if it is what do you do about this? There's just going to have to make your peace with the fact that your computer is infested with malware now or are there other options?

[00:07:01] Craig Peterson: [00:07:01] Yeah, McAfee of course had tattooed on his body.

[00:07:05] Find me dead. I did not kill myself. We know that he was not suicide. In Spain, the Spanish jail, your questions are really good. One because we're seeing as 70%. Mentoree antivirus software this year has missed 77 0% of the attacks that have been coming this year and McAfee himself came out and said that the McAfee antivirus software is useless against today's threats.

[00:07:39] One of the senior executives at Symantec, which of course has Norton and other antivirus products, all. Came out and said our software's useless against modern threats. So to answer your question, there are some things you can do. And I'm going to go into this in more detail this weekend. I think it's an important thing here on our July 4th weekend independence day.

[00:08:03] The bottom line is antivirus software no longer can protect you is using outdated technology. It's using signatures. So what happens is you can just like with a virus, you can get the virus and the body now knows those. T-cells remember how to fight that virus in the future. Antivirus software is much the same.

[00:08:30] It's looking for. Things that have been seen before. That's not what's happening anymore. We're seeing all new threats, just constantly. We're seeing phishing attacks and the, it gets around the antivirus software. There are some solutions or some things you can do. And frankly, if you're running windows, There's some pre things you can do.

[00:08:53] And I'm going to also, it's part of the series I've been doing. I'm going to be releasing this to people on my newsletter. I made a video last week, in fact about some things you can do. All right. But you have to sign up. You have to go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe. And you have to listen on Saturday from one till three, because we will be talking more about this as well.

[00:09:15] Matt Gagnon: [00:09:15] And there you go. Promoting the show on the weekend. I love doing it. Craig Peterson, our tech guru always joins us on Wednesdays at this time. I appreciate it, Craig. Thanks so much. And we'll talk to you again very soon, sir.

[00:09:24] Craig Peterson: [00:09:24] Take care, Matt.