AS HEARD ON: WGAN Mornings News with Matt Gagnon: Swarms of Armed Drones, Ransomware, Autonomous Vehicles, and Amazon

Good morning everybody! 

I was on WGAN this morning with Matt Gagnon. I started this morning talking about Drone swarms and how the military in different countries are considering using it, and the concerns about this technology.  Then we talked about Hyundai and Apples' electric autonomous vehicles.  We discussed the problem with Ransomware. Then we talked about Amazon and my thoughts on the transition.   Here we go with Matt.

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

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] We survived the nor'easter well, actually it came from the West. The big snowstorm, good news, maybe more snow on the way I use, shouldn't have been complaining about the fact that we didn't have much of a winter this year because it sure did hit us. Here, up in New Hampshire, we can get snow, even in early April, which is not something to look forward to. It does go away quickly if it comes at the time of year.

Hey, I was on with Mr. Matt Gagnon this morning. He and I talked about a number of subjects, including what's going to happen with Jeff Bezos stepping down and on day-to-day operations over there at Amazon. So here we go.

Matt Gagnon: [00:00:46] It's all things technology tech talk with Craig Peterson right now on News Radio 98.5 FM and AM 560 WGAN.

Craig Peterson joins us on Wednesdays at this time to go over the world of technology, and today being no exception to that. We welcome Craig onto the program. How are you, sir?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:06] Hey, good morning. Rowe, of course, one of the sponsors. They have the Hyundai dealership. Did you hear about it? Apple and the Hyundai actually they're Kia brand, and it looks like they might be coming out with one of these smart self-driving cars. Electric, of course.

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:23] I did not see that. That's the future, though. Isn't it, right? We're going to be having 10, 20, 30 years from now. I'm not driving my car anymore. Am I right about that?

Craig Peterson: [00:01:31] Yeah, I like that. I'll be old enough at that point that if I'm smart, I won't be driving myself.

Matt Gagnon: [00:01:38] Take a nap behind the wheel. It'd be great.

Craig Peterson: [00:01:40] Yeah, exactly. I'll be able to look between the dashboard and the steering wheel as I'm driving down the road.

But yeah, and the new cars too, that have come out now from Tesla, they've got brand new models. They don't even have a steering wheel anymore. It's got a yoke. They almost like an airplane. I don't know if you've seen those too, but they're starting to really move fast. Although Tesla they're saying maybe not the winner that everyone's been predicting, they're so far ahead with some of these technologies.

There's a lot of reasons they're concerned about the fact that they don't have LIDAR on the cars, which gives a really great view of what's ahead on the road. They're also looking at it saying you've got those cameras, isn't that wonderful, but when Ford and GM and. Hyundai Et cetera, et cetera, really go forward on this they say, they're just going to swamp, and Tesla is going to be left on the road behind them.

Matt Gagnon: [00:02:41] We're speaking with Craig Peterson, the tech guru that joins us every Wednesday. You also hear him on Saturdays on this very network, doing a show where he goes into all of these stories in detail in depth here.

Now I do want to touch on this one, which I find fascinating envisioning these swarms of drones and whether or not they're getting too fast now. And whether or not we're going to be able to deal with this whole swarm issue in the future. So what is a drone swarm, and how does this impact us?

Craig Peterson: [00:03:07] You might've seen this at the Olympics over in China. Where they had the opening ceremonies and overhead, normally they're shooting up all kinds of fireworks, which they did do, of course, but they had all of a sudden this display in the sky. It was all of these drones, it was thousands of drones that were synchronously flying, and they had lights on them. So they could put up all this different optics, basically, almost like a screen, a computer screen in the sky.

We've got these types of drones right now. They are used in these types of events, like the Olympics or big games like this weekend. I'm sure there'll be something going on, but there's another side of this.

That's the darker side that you're referring to, which is you've got these drones. Now, a lot of these drones can fly by themselves without any human input or computer external computer input. They have cameras in them. Of course, we know that. We've seen all kinds of beautiful photos of the forest or cities from these drones with cameras, but they're building artificial intelligence into them now. Where concern really comes in is that this artificial intelligence is able to determine if someone is an enemy soldier or if their face matches someone that they want to attack.

Now, it's one thing to have one little drone come after you, excuse me, with a small amount of high explosives, right? Because you can just bat it out of the way and get out of there.

Where they're really concerned about is a swarm of like 75 drones coming at you, kamikaze style. The Indian army just generated this, and they're coming up with these thousand drones, strong little armies. If they're aiming at you, if they're coming for you and they have just a fraction less than an ounce of high explosive on them, there is no avoiding them.

A US Navy has also looked at some of this. They've been demonstrated numerous times, and this is really scary. Especially the whole autonomous idea where they identify someone that might be a suspect, a terrorist, or whatever. Instead of bringing them in and having even a military trial. The drone recognized you, and they attack you and kill you right there. Even if it's not a battlefield,

Matt Gagnon: [00:05:42] We're speaking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru here. He joins us every Wednesday at this time to talk a little bit about the world of technology.

Ransomware payoffs are now surging and are nearing 350 million. From what I understand about these ransomware things and you've been talking about this for quite some time on this very program. Basically, companies are held hostage by ransomware, and people that are held hostage by ransomware essentially paying off the people holding them hostage. This is a crazy story.

Craig Peterson: [00:06:08] Yeah, it is.  If you look at the different countries out there, these different countries, different payoff amounts, and the percentages of businesses that will payout, the US is the lowest in the nation when it comes to will we payout.  Of course, the US says we don't pay for hostages. We don't. We don't have the trade of hostages very often. We can talk about some really bad trades, but at any rate, we just don't pay ransoms. 

We now know that the federal government might come after us as a business if we do pay a ransom because we're supporting terrorism. Other countries, like in Europe, many of the countries versus the US, will pay two to three times more than us, but now we're seeing huge payoffs that are just surging right now. Three times plus over the last year.  They're doing it because that's where the money is. People are paying the ransoms more and more. That is the main reason that these Bitcoin and other blockchain currencies have been surging over the last 10 years. It really is because of ransomware payments.

We're not protecting our systems. They're getting in. The other side is this, Matt,  is they're holding our data hostage. It isn't enough that they go onto the computers, encrypt everything and say, I hope I have a good backup.

What they're doing now is first, before you even know anything's going on, they take all of your stuff. They steal your files, your spreadsheets, your documents, and then they hold it ransom. Then after that, they say, Oh, and by the way, here's some samples of some of the files of yours we have, unless you pay us even more, we're going to release those out there, which of course includes the family jewels, your intellectual property, and other things.

So these bad guys have gotten very bad, and countries like North Korea are using it to get hard currency. To get the money that they can spend in other places. Iran doing the same thing.

So it's not just some little kid in the basement of their parents' home over in Eastern Europe. It is countries that are coming for us, and we're just not protecting ourselves.

Matt Gagnon: [00:08:32] Craig, before we let you go, one really quick question here for you before you sign off Amazon is now making a transition. Jeff

Craig Peterson: [00:08:39] Bezos

Matt Gagnon: [00:08:40] is no longer going to be the CEO moving forward. Obviously, the company will go on and just like Apple, as I was joking with earlier with Danny on the program here, just like when Apple was Steve jobs, it's not as if one human being is that important to the success of the company. But I would like you to reflect really quickly on the legacy of Bezos. He was pretty much there from the very beginning when they had a really terrible garage-based office, right? All the way to the point where he's got $185 billion and is the most the wealthiest person in the world.  Just reflect a little bit on what it means that he's stepping away.

Craig Peterson: [00:09:12] I looked at some statistics on comparing what's happening with Amazon and with Google, both of them have. Cloud services, right? Amazon had to build up all of this computing infrastructure in order to support their stores, which started, of course, like a bookstore. They had massive infrastructure, and they designed it themselves. Did just a marvelous job.  The guy that's taking over from Bezos is the guy that's in charge of cloud services over there at Amazon.

Compare that to our friends at Google, who also have cloud services, and Google, on about $13 billion of revenue for cloud services, lost about $6 billion. That is crazy. It's terrible. Google just is not doing the cloud well.  The guy that's taken over from Bezos has defined cloud services in the entire industry.

Amazon has about 60% of the marketplace. So I think things are just going to continue. Frankly, this guy knows what he's doing, and he ran a huge division of Amazon.

Matt Gagnon: [00:10:25] All right. That is Craig Peterson, our tech guru. Again, you can hear him on Saturdays at one. O'clock here to get more in-depth on many of these same topics.

Thanks a lot, Craig. Appreciate it. We'll talk to you again.

Craig Peterson: [00:10:34] At that point, I was cut off. So, Matt, you're welcome. All right, everybody, have a great day.

We'll be back this weekend. Take care. Bye-bye.

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