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Good morning, everybody. I was on WTAG this morning with Steve Fourni.  \ Here we go with Jim.

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. I was on Jim’s show this morning and we had, I think, a really good discussion about security, privacy, what Mozilla’s doing, why Firefox people are praising Apple, new anti-tracking technology. How you can take advantage of this no matter what kind of. The system you are using and about law enforcement here shutting down VPN services, people going to jail over this.

So again, yeah, I told you how many years ago, how long have I been talking about VPNs and how dangerous they really are? So we got into that and I explained what types you shouldn’t use, et cetera. That’s what this is all about. Hope everybody has a great week. I am going to air the best of we’ll call it and showing this weekend and cover a few different topics.

So I, I really hope you guys had a great holiday season and have a fantastic new year take care.

Steve Fourni: [00:01:04] All right. Here’s Craig Peterson, Craig. It’s Steve Forni here in Springfield. Good morning.

By the seat of our pants today, Craig, so welcome and welcome into the mess.

Craig Peterson: [00:01:14] Yeah. Hey, Danny’s a true professional here.

You, I understand. Dan,

Steve Fourni: [00:01:19] He gets paid more than I do. Oh, man.

Craig Peterson: [00:01:22] Yeah. It is the week between, so we get a break today. There are no sweeps this week so we can, we can take it a little easy.

Steve Fourni: [00:01:29] Yeah, absolutely. And speaking of taking it easy, it looks like Apple has stepped up its anti-trafficking privacy features.

And Mozilla. Is it Mozilla? I always never know how to pronounce that, but I do use Firefox Mozilla regularly and they are

Craig Peterson: [00:01:44] yeah. And yeah, this is really cool. You’re right. Your Mozilla is how you pronounce it. Congratulations and gee, man, I just can’t let them, I’m sorry. I D I can’t help myself this morning.

It’s Firefox. And if you’re using just a standard browser and you want to stay safe, it’s a good idea to use Firefox and Firefox has really been getting a lot of advertisers upset. They have a special little fenced-in thing that they put in place automatically. If you go onto Facebook, Where it restricts Facebook from accessing any of the data from any of the other websites you went to.

Of course, Facebook really hates that. And Mozilla’s Firefox is also with the next big release. Having a new feature where it blocks every website from knowing what any other website has done is see because these guys out there that are trying to track you. We’re talking about mostly advertisers here, not the criminals, but they’ve gotten really smart.

So they’ll say, Oh, I know if you go to iheart.com. That I, heart.com is going to have their logo on the page. And the URL for that logo is iheart.com/logo,dot JPEG, for instance, so that they know that’s the case. So now you go to X, Y, z.com and at X, Y, z.com. And you have your cookies blocked.

So they’ll say, Oh, okay no cookies. Okay, fine. Fine fine. Done. Let me try and download iheart.com/logo.jpeg and so it’ll put the request out in a time how long it takes it to get that graph. Is it, this stuff is just so advanced Steve, and the graphical shows up in a couple of milliseconds because it’s cast because you been to the iHeart radio site.

And so even without cookies, That website, like it could be, Facebook could be anything knows where you’ve gone online because they can check to see if you’ve got the iHeart logo cached. They can check to see if you’ve been to X, Y, or Z site. So Firefox from Mozilla. Is going to really tighten down, not just on fire, not just on Facebook, like they have been, but on Firefox doing it for every website that’s out there.

But now these guys that Mozilla, very privacy-conscious, very security conscious. They’re now praising this new release of Apple’s operating system iOS for the I-phones and iPads. And Apple’s really got Facebook in a tizzy right now. The Zuck is really upset because what Apple is doing is changing the way it allows advertisers to track you. When you’re online there are these little tags that Apple has put in place that you could change in their advertising tags, and you can go into your settings and you can change it. And that kind of blows who’s out of the water. Anybody that’s been tracking you?

Apple has changed it again, now. They’re saying, Hey, listen to Facebook or whatever sites. Wants to track you. And they’re in putting it in place too, for the apps. There’ve been all kinds of complaints about apps, for instance, and the tracking. Our friends over the department of Homeland security have been accused of and admitted to buying information from app developers about people who might be illegally in the country and track where they are located.

This isn’t just on iOS. This is way worse over on the Android side. So there are all of these companies that are data aggregators that are getting data from everywhere they can that have been paying the app developers to use their libraries.

Apple is going to be tracking that, stopping it, letting you know somebody is trying to track you. And it’s a free app, Steve, that you downloaded. It ain’t free. Okay. They are, many of these are tracking you.

So Apple is really raising the bar here on stopping the tracking. Improving security, which Apple’s always been far better at than Android, which is why one of the reasons why I say never ever used Android.

Hopefully, I had enough ever since there for it.

Steve Fourni: [00:06:17] How about. Google. Are they going to do anything in terms of, cause one of the biggest issues? I have a big issue with Google. I’m still convinced they put one of my local flower shops out of business because when you Google it, all you get are ads for pro flowers.

But I, I feel Google itself is the one that again when I say into my phone, boy, I could really use a new toolset. All of a sudden I get ads on Google for toolsets, and obviously they have Google Chrome, which competes with Mozilla. I know we’re talking about something different, but are they approaching Google sort of the same way, or is there any sort of connection between Mozilla and Apple against Google?

Craig Peterson: [00:06:51] Yeah. Google Chrome, as you mentioned, the Chrome browser very popular. It’s probably the number one browser out there. Just generally speaking is a big contractor. They love to track you what you’re doing, where you’re going. Remember Google is business is selling information about you. So if you’re using Mozilla, if you are using a browser from a company, and Firefox from a company that doesn’t want to share your data, Google not only wants to share it, they want to sell it. They want to put it together. They want to make them the center of your life.

You might remember Steve, back in the day, Google has a motto. I shouldn’t say was, don’t be evil. Do you remember that? You can’t find that on their website anymore?

It’s the definition of evil. Now, when it comes to this sort of thing about your information. So the safest browsers, if you’re using Firefox, Steve like I said, that’s probably the safest ish, depending on what we’re talking about. But from your privacy standpoint, it’s definitely the safest, it’s one of the safest from a security standpoint, another one that’s very good is one Apple puts out.

And if you’re using an Apple device, you’re already using it probably by default, you are it’s called Safari S A F A R. I. Your little blue round logo and it’s available on their desktops, the Apple desktops, but it’s also available for Windows and Apple is very good about not again, tracking Apple does not make money by selling your information.

Apple makes money by selling you hardware and services versus again, Google, which is the, as I said, the definition of evil. There are studies that have been done about how Google this last election cycle made major changes to the way people voted some interesting studies came out, looking at orange County in California which has been a very conservative County for years, and studies showing that in that one County, Google changed 30 to 50,000 votes just by doing what you talked about, Steve, which is my local florist run out of business. And I’d bet it was Google showing ads for these national flower shops. That’s what they’ve done. And that’s what they did during this election cycle as well to promote candidates they liked.

Steve Fourni: [00:09:29] That’s scary. And I know I’ve heard you talk in the past about this, but I guess while we’re on it if people want to search something, but they don’t want Google, I know you’ve said duckduckgo. Which again, to me, I have a hard time with just, cause it sounds childish. Like Google works cause you could just say, yeah, just Google it. Like it works. It flows off the tongue.

I think marketing is a big part of that saying yeah, just DuckDuckgo. It doesn’t really fit the lexicon, very well.

Craig Peterson: [00:09:55] You could use Quant as well, Q W A N T that’s another one you can just quantify. It sounds cooler than a duck.

I say doc and Qwant is another one that’s pretty safe. It’s out of Europe. It’s out of France more specifically. But I really liked Duck Duck Go. In fact nowadays. It’s rare that I use Google. If I’m looking for something really technical, I actually use something called Devon think, which is a.

A database system and search engine that searches search engine just called a metasearch and it runs on my own hardware here. So I have a watch, certain sites for things, and puts it all together. But that’s my first. And then you use Google if it’s very technical, and if it has anything to do with anything else, I use duck go because they don’t even use your search queries in order to feed you results which of course Google does.

Duck go just takes general advertising and they do all of this on purpose because they want you to have a safe, fair online search experience.

Steve Fourni: [00:11:04] Very interesting. We’re talking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru, and maybe we can just sneak this in a quick here because. VPN services enabling cybercrime and law enforcement agencies trying to crack down on it. How’s that going?

Craig Peterson: [00:11:20] People who listen to my show, know I am no fan of these VPN services. And in fact, most of them, they are almost always let me just put it this way. Almost always.

They make your data last year. And there are quite a few reasons I talk about it. And I got a really nice note this week from one of our listeners saying that she stopped using these services because they do make it much less safe. But this case here, global law enforcement agencies now, including the FBI have shut down some more of these.

VPN services that were being used by criminals to launch ransomware campaigns, phishing attacks men in the middle attacks, where they have now access to all of your data. So you’re using this VPM service, Steve, in order to be safer to keep your data encrypted, all of the lies and promises that they tell you in these ads that they run.

And in fact, what’s happening here is these VPN services, because they were shut down here by operation Nova. I led out of Germany. In fact, they’re pleased agencies over there, operation Nova, they were decrypting, everything you were sent over the network. So you’re going to your bank. They’ve got your bank account information.

They’ve got your login. They’ve got your password. They’ve got it all. The only way to be really safe. And you know what, one more thing on that this is the way the campaigns stayed safe. You wonder why we haven’t seen campaign emails leaked to, because of this one trick that I’m about to tell you, and that is, they used.

Two-factor authentication. Now not the type that sends a text to you, your phone, but one of these fobs, one of these keys that are available now, Google actually sells one. Surprisingly enough. Now they use it internally. I like duo, D U O, which we use professionally. And there are also YubiKeys, which we really like. Y U B I K E Y S

So when you log into a website using one of these things, What happens is it’s something, which is a username and password, along with something you have, which is a six-digit code that changes every 30 seconds. And that’s why we haven’t seen the Democrats’ email leak. The Republican’s email leak this time around, and that’s what can defeat.

These VPNs are actually grabbing your information and selling it on the dark web and people’s bank accounts are being emptied because of it. But Interpol Europol the FBI has been shutting some of these down stoned use. Oh,

Steve Fourni: [00:14:10] scary stuff.  Craig, this is all good information for the people. If they want more information now, obviously you got the show.

What else? How else can they get all the resources that you offer?

Craig Peterson: [00:14:21] I have, of course, a weekly newsletter that you can catch and you can just get that by going to Craig peterson.com and sign up as you’ve probably guessed. I’m not one of these heavy marketers, but if you’re ingesting VPNs, et cetera, I’ve done some webinars.

I can send you a link to watch them. Just email me. M E @Craig peterson.com and in the subject line. Put in VPN so that I know what you’re looking for. And me@craigpeterson.com. I can send you info on that or anything, but if you go to the website, you can send it, you’ll get my newsletter and you’ll find out about future training, too.

Great stuff as always, Craig, really appreciate the time. Have a great new year and we will catch up in 2021.

Looking forward to it. Hey take care of Steve and Danny, both and Jim listening at home.

Steve Fourni: [00:15:11] Yeah, no doubt. We appreciate the time and we’ll catch up. There goes our buddy Craig Peterson, great stuff is always taking things and breaking it down for us all to understand which is right.

Craig Peterson: [00:15:22] And a happy new year to everybody out there take care. We will be back after the first of the year more stuff. Of course, we’ll be talking about now. Hopefully, it’ll be a bit of a better year. I think I’m going to come out with something too for businesses, small businesses on okay. Post-COVID.

How do you get your remote workers secure? We’ve got to pull up our socks on now and really let’s make this a business and no longer just to hack. Anyway, let me know if you’re interested in that. You can always email again, me at Craig peterson.com. Let me know. That’s how I come up with these ideas. You guys ask you have questions about things.

And I always put together a response. Sometimes it’s on the radio. Sometimes it’s a little, a special report and sometimes, of course, it’s a full-court, so would take care of everybody. I so appreciate you being with me.

Bye-bye.

 

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