Craig is in the WGAN Morning News with Ken and Matt. This morning, we touched on a whole bunch of topics in the news. We discussed whether we should trust Google. We talked about Autonomous vehicles and the societal implications and I talked about two-factor authentication and how you can protect yourself from sim-jacking.
These and more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com
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Related Articles:
You Need Two-Factor Authentication Even If Google Screwed It Up?
Autonomous Cars — Are they ready for Prime Time?
Why Are We Still Trusting Google?
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Transcript:
Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.
Airing date: 06/12/2019
Can You Trust Google?, Security Summer, Autonomous Cars, Two-Factor Authentication
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Craig
Good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. I heard "Big Papi" took his first steps in the hospital today. So, that's good. It brings back thoughts of everyone that has family and friends in the hospital that aren't celebrities and people that are injured. My thoughts and prayers go out to everybody every day. It's just a reminder of how fragile things can be in this life. This morning I was on with our friends Ken and Matt up at WGAN. And as usual, we spoke about a few different things. We had quite a little conversation about trusting Google, should you trust them? Can you trust them? There was a surprising revelation that came out, in fact, just last week about them, and what they've been doing, during the previous 14 years, a significant security problem. We had a chat about two-factor authentication, and I gave them workaround, a way to make it safe, even if you have to use text messages SMS for two-factor authentication because that's not secure. But there is a reliable way to do it.
We talked about a little bit more of course about autonomous cars which are all in the news again, and what's the safety factor there? How far away are we? I took a couple of different angles than I made with Jim Polito on that discussion today, as well. So here we go. Also, don't forget, we've got our security summer, starting up in July, I will start sending out some emails next week, things have been crazy around here. As you can imagine, with all of the companies now getting hacked, and the losing money coming to me, and you know, everyone in the security business, which, of course, is way understaffed. And shout out to those of you who are trying to get into security, I got another email this last week from someone that was starting into a security career, and he's in his 50s. So there's something to be learned there, I want to encourage everybody. Remember the adage, "You can teach an old dog new tricks." It's a terrible saying. But you can learn a lot of this stuff, you really can. And there's a lot of people out there who have been trying to convince you that you can't do that, really all you need is their little bit of anti-virus software, or whatever it is, you know, they're selling that to you. Because that's all, they have. That's all they know. Well, they're not doing you any favors. They are trying to mess with you. You can learn this stuff. That's what the security summer going to be about this year, and I'm going to be teaching this some free classes. You know, I get paid for doing this too. And if you want more in depth, then you're probably going to want to sign up for one of my courses. But I want to get this information to everybody. Because if you know me well enough, you know, I got hacked. That was 30 years ago, about now, a long time ago. And it scared the daylights out of me. And I started to learn about this and trying to figure it out. It's taken me years, decades, to get to the point where I'm at now. And I am excited to share a lot of this with you.
Just watch for my security summer. If you want to find out more, email me at Craig Peterson dot com, ask any questions that you might have. And I'll make sure you know, when I'm starting this whole little program up, because I want you to be aware of all of the major points here, right, I'm not trying to turn into security experts, that takes quite a bit of work. However, I do want you to be familiar with all of the problems. All the talk about hacks that have happened, how it happened, what should have been done by those companies give you an idea, but as well as what you can do to protect yourself a few tips on how to protect yourself, it's going to be kind of a busy summer. And if you sign up, and you'll be able to get a notification as to when these little courses are going to happen. And I'm going to leave them up for about a week or so you know because it does get stale. And I do need to revisit them. I don't want want to put them up blankly for the world to see forever. So keep an eye out. Email me at Craig Peterson dot com, and now we'll go to Ken and Matt. I want to encourage you guys, and you can learn this. There are the people that just been messing with you. You know the bottom line.
Ken
Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us at 738 every Wednesday, and this is 738 on a Wednesday, which means you're talking to Craig Peterson. Craig. Welcome to the program, sir.
Craig
Hey, good morning. It is a Wednesday but is it every Wednesday? Today?
Ken
That's a good point. And you know what it is a lie in and of itself because I believe we did not talk to you last Wednesday. So it's most Wednesdays.
Craig
That's true. Yeah, I took a bit of vacation. I'm a motorcycle guy. And I have a motorcycle that is 32 years old. It's a 1987 BMW with 143,000 miles on it now. The only thing I had to do is replace the rear wheel on that bike. It's just been a phenomenal bike. So, I went up to like George in New York, and we rode around with some buddies for a week. And it was just fantastic.
Ken
Well, good. But that doesn't mean tech news stops. I hopped on your website, Craig Peterson dot com. To see what kind of top stories you had there and you have one topic here. Why are we still trusting Google?
Can you answer that?
Matt
Great question. Well, they did say early in Google's history that they that their whole operating philosophy was Don't be evil, right. Are they evil? Now? Did you notice they took that off of their website? Right?
Craig
Yeah, exactly. I don't know why we're still trusting some of these different companies out there. They are selling all kinds of information about us. And, you know, that's not necessarily a bad thing when you get right down to it. Because, frankly, do you want to see car commercials all the time? Or would you rather see a car commercial when you are looking to buy a car, right? And, again, goes back, Matt, to what you've said many times, and that is if you're not paying for something, you might want to consider that you're the product and not the customer. And they have been doing all kinds of things. We're selling our data. But the other big problem that came out very recently, within the last couple of weeks is that in fact, Google has been storing our usernames and passwords for people that were using, basically their G Suite services. But it's been out there for 14 years in the clear. They're pretty good about security, although Android itself isn't the best out there. But now their G Suite customers are a little upset because of what's been out there. I was talking just yesterday with an employee who had been working at a company that was collecting personal information. They were collecting home addresses, phone numbers, and they were taking donations and were selling them. It was a great little company doing just all kinds of super things to raise funds for some good charitable organizations. It turns out they were using Google Forms to collect all this personal information about donors. You know, come on, guys, we cannot trust Google, we're using more and more of these online websites, software as a service. Think about Google Sheets, for instance, as well as Google Forms. And we're putting data in there that may end up getting exposed. We should not be doing that. Think twice about it. In our profession, we refer to this as shadow IT or shadow information technology. Historically, we had these big rooms, these big glass rooms with all of the computers in them. And we had true professionals that were running them, and making sure data was being kept safe, and information was not being stolen and leaked out. Now we've got the marketing department going out and creating contracts with companies that have online services, we have the same thing happening with sales and manufacturing and distribution and our purchasing managers are our data is not safe, and it's never been less secure. So be careful what you're putting out there, what you're given to Google what you're given to these other companies because frankly, it's a real problem.
Matt
Craig Peterson, our tech guru, joins us, most Wednesdays at this time to talk about the world of technology. And today is one of those days, Craig, while you're talking, I'm looking at a story on CBS This Morning about Uber's secret self-driving test facility for their self-driving autonomous cars. I know you had a story also about whether or not autonomous vehicles are ready for prime time. And I think it does beg the question, how prepared for prime time are these things? I know, it's a conversation I've had several times, and it seems like the older the person I'm talking to the more it freaks them out that there's no driver behind the wheel. I think it freaks everybody out. It just freaks out, you know, people in their 50s, 60s, and 70s a lot more than it does everybody else. But statistics, you know, are being what they are, you know, often they can be safer, then human behind the wheel. So what do you think? I mean, are they close to ready to take over the roads?
Craig
Well, I really like I mentioned this yesterday. I liked this story that came out in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago. And it said that autonomous vehicles, these self-driving cars are 90% ready and all we have left is 90% to go. In other words, yeah, there's a lot of things that look like we're ready to go and it might be just a few more years, and we'll have autonomous vehicles. In reality, it's probably going to be quite a while yet. And you talk about you know, older guys like Ken and myself who are over 30. And we're looking at some of these things. And we're concerned because we've seen failures before. Do you remember Cadillac v 864?
Matt
Back then, I wasn't much of a car person.
Ken
I did have a Mustang in 1960.
Matt
Do you remember the Corvair? Unsafe at any speed?
Craig
I do, and you know, Ralph Nader thing, we still have Nader dots on our tires. But that was an example back in the early 80s of Cadillac trying to make cars more efficient, the engines more efficient, and they had a V-8 engine. And what would happen is if you got onto the highway and you started driving, of course, at highway speeds, you're going down the road, you don't need as much horsepower to keep a vehicle going at a pace as you need to get the car starting at that speed. So they said okay, well, we're going to have the system that automatically shut down cylinders. So you'd be a V-8, and you'd be just roaring up and you getting on the highway and you're often running. Then it would cut back to six cylinders, even four cylinders. The concept was wonderful. But what ended up happening is that engine would say, as you're at a stop sign, oh my I need more horsepower, counteract the braking. Of course, They were not thinking about the brakes very well at the time. And then the car would lunge into the intersection so that you could get t-boned. Fast forward not very many years, and we had the Toyota with a sudden acceleration problem. That turned out to be a software error, where much the same thing was happening. A car would jump into the intersection. We're not going to get into all of the details behind it all. But I think with age comes from experience. And we've had some horrible experiences over the years with vehicles and some of this newer technology. So Matt, to answer your question, a lot is going on the autonomous vehicle space.
In some cases, the cars are much, much safer, you look at millions of miles driven, compare human drivers to these autonomous vehicles, and the autonomous vehicles almost always win. But we also now have prejudices against the self-driving cars, social warriors are, you know, get on your horses here. Because there are people who when there's an autonomous vehicle on the road, or they think it's a ton of mess, they behave differently. Now they've been tested have been run, I don't know if you've seen any of these pictures with autonomous vehicles, where they took the driver's seat, and they made it quite a bit deeper, think of thicker padding on that seat. And they hid a driver inside the driver's position. You could not see them unless you looked exceptionally close. You could not see that there was a driver in the vehicle. Then the driver just drove around, caught down and of course, the cameras everywhere so they could see what the people's reactions were. People were going out of their way to mess with the car. They pedestrians were jumping in front of it. Vehicles were cutting it off, slamming on their brakes, doing everything they could to make it so that autonomous vehicle would get involved in an accident. I don't know. Maybe they're just trying to see what it would do. Of course, it wasn't an autonomous vehicle. There's a human driver in there. We, as a society, as people, are not ready for these yet. And frankly, I think the Wall Street Journal's right - We're 90% of the way there. And honestly, we have 90% of the way to go. Because there are so many things, we haven't even considered yet.
Ken
When he joins us, most Wednesdays at 738, to fill us in on tech news.
We at the radio station. I don't want to be critical of our radio station. However, they started this two-factor authentication. So every
time I get some on my email, they have to send me a text message with a code. I think this is a royal pain in the butt. I want you to tell me they shouldn't do that.
Craig
Okay, can they not do that.
Ken
Thanks so much. Thank you for joining us today.
Craig
I will leave it at that. Yeah, here's what's going to, first of all, there's a big problem with the way they're doing it. That is that there is something called SIMjacking or hijacking of your SIM card. So if they're sending you a text, that is very dangerous. What's been happening is that if you are a target, now they're not doing this in a broad fishing attempt. If you can are a target, and the criminals know they want to go after you, they can now take over your cell phone, and they will get the text. So it doesn't do a whole lot of good from that aspect. We use something called DUO. D-U-O, which is fantastic. For two factor authentication, we use something called Yubi keys, which are very good as well. If your company's requiring you to us a text message for authentication, there is a relatively safe way of doing it. And that is you can use something like Google Voice, assuming your Google account has not been hacked, right. But Google Voice, where there is no SIM card, there is no cell phone that SIM card to hijack. If you use this and it is what I do for places that have to have a text message sent for two-factor authentication. So if they have to send you a text message, it goes to Google Voice. I have my own little phone company, and I use that as well. That way the text message will come in via an app to your phone, you can check the app, and now you're reasonably safe. But yeah, in this day and age, you know two-factor authentication is something that that does make sense. We do have to draw a line, and that one does it make the most sense. I'd like it to authenticate you at most every four hours or once a day, particularly for emails, if you have to do it every time. It gets a little bit old, pretty darn fast. But you know it's the reality of today's world.
Matt
Craig Peterson, our tech guru, he joins us at this time every Wednesday to find out exactly what's happening in the world of technology. Craig, we only have a couple of minutes left. So lastly, I will ask you whether or not you judge everyone on social media? Are you part of the mob that rules everyone?
Craig
Oh man. I am not. I don't jump on anybody's back. I just had that happen to me with a significant hacking group. As you know, I run the national webinars for the FBI Infragard program. I'm pretty visible out there in the security world, right. I do lots of radio interviews and TV and stuff. I posted an article on my website and got jumped on by a small mob out there. We've got to be careful remember it's so easy to say something negative online. Our kids are getting bullied every day. Bullying seems to be quite a habit nowadays. I don't know what happened to free speech. We have these militant people out there these fascist like the Antifas. Total fascist don't want to hear what you have to say. And these internet mobs have become a real thing and a very negative thing. From my viewpoint. Anyways.
Ken
Good news as our tech guru joins us most Wednesdays at 738.
Thank you, Mr. Peterson. We will talk to you next Wednesday.
Craig
Take care.
Matt
All right. Thanks a lot, Craig. We appreciate it.
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