Good morning everybody!
I was on WGAN this morning with Matt Gagnon and started this morning talking about some interesting developments that happened involving one of Jupiter’s moons. Then we discussed how Gen Z is sharing so much on Social Media and how it is being used against them in some cases by law enforcement. Then we talked about secure communications. Here we go with Matt.
And more tech tips, news, and updates visit – CraigPeterson.com.
—
Automated Machine Generated Transcript:
Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Hey, good morning, everybody. Craig Peterson here. Ganymede my gosh. I’ve been watching this space opera, but I absolutely love it. They’ve done such a good job that was actually written. These books were written by a group of people who got together and they have a pseudo gnome that they’re calling themselves, but it’s just, it’s amazing.
Anyway, when I saw Ganymede in the news and this is probably why it made it to the news, frankly. But when I saw Ganymede in the news, which is one of the moons of Jupiter and FM radio signals coming from it, it blew my mind. Absolutely blew my mind.
So I talked to Matt about that because I’m a bit of a space geek, and of course we got into what’s the problem right now. What’s going on in technology-wise with this internet shutdown on conservative voices and being able to track people who were down in the Capitol. What are they doing? What’s the FBI and everybody else up to? So here we go with Mr. Matt Gagnon
Matt Gagnon: [00:01:03] Speaking of things that are usually done on Wednesdays, how about Craig Peterson? Our tech guru who joins us now as he always does. Of course, you can hear him on Saturdays at one o’clock, as well, for his show where he goes into greater depth on all of these questions that we’re about to ask him right now on the show. Craig, how are you this morning?
Craig Peterson: [00:01:21] I’m doing well. We’re on Newsradio 98.5 FM as well as am 560.
I don’t know if you heard this one or not. This just absolutely amazed me. I’m a science buff. You may not know it, but I was actually one of the contractors or subcontractors to the RCA Astro space people and help design parts of the subsystems for the space shuttle back in the day. So a bit of a space fan.
But you know what Ganymede is?
Matt Gagnon: [00:01:51] Yeah Ganymede is a Moon of Jupiter, right?
Craig Peterson: [00:01:53] Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Matt Gagnon: [00:01:54] You’re do know who you’re talking to don’t you?
Craig Peterson: [00:01:55] That’s true too. We can talk about the show.
Matt Gagnon: [00:01:57] We can nerd out all. If you don’t want to talk about technology, we can talk about space and just have everybody turn off the dial. That’s fine.
Craig Peterson: [00:02:03] We have a satellite that is circling Jupiter right now and it picked up an FM radio transmission from Ganymede. It was about a five-second burst. It was frequency modulating. And they’re saying it probably wasn’t ET. It was probably just the clouds in Ganymede and the electrons creating the cyclotron thing, but anyway. Totally geeked out. I loved it.
I wasn’t sure if you heard,
Matt Gagnon: [00:02:35] Are you kidding? I knew the moment you said, Ganymede. I knew exactly what you were talking about. I did see it. I did see a news article was written on it that said that scientists are explaining it as probably a natural phenomenon, but they have absolutely no idea what it is, basically.
Craig Peterson: [00:02:48] So cool. Anyway.
Matt Gagnon: [00:02:50] That could in fact be an alien base on Ganymede and they were about to invade us. That’s, 2021, right?
2021.
All right. Craig Peterson certainly while that is a technological topic, we have earthbound technological topics to get to, and we can’t get away from the fact that the big story of last week was of course what happened on Capitol Hill.
One of the interesting stories that you and I were chatting about before that I’d like to ask you about a little bit more here is about the stupidity of some of these people because the social media feeds for many of the people that participated in this is giving all the police, the feds, everybody who’s investigating this just tons and tons of evidence to go after them.
I’m thinking of the picture of the guy who had the podium walking away Hey, look, there’s my face just waving at the camera. The Viking guy, everybody else, all seemed to gleefully and happily share all the information about all the laws they were breaking on social media, making the law enforcement job pretty easy. Isn’t it?
Craig Peterson: [00:03:44] Yeah, it’s really easy. We talked about some of the alternative social media sites out there as well, like Parler, Gab, and Mastodon and some of these others. Did you also see that this one lady a programmer? She wrote a piece of code that was 400 lines long now, for those of us, that aren’t total geeks. That means it’s a very simple, very small program and she was able to pull down everything off of Parler. That includes, this is before Parler went offline, the videos, the photos with all of the GPS information still embedded in them. Apparently, this is just a treasure trove of even more information.
Like you were just talking about people that we’re sharing it over there on Parler, and it wasn’t stripped of any of the identifying information. You’re right. This is just making it so easy for law enforcement to find all of these people and that’s where it’s going to get really interesting. Obviously, these people were among the more extreme out there.
Matt Gagnon: [00:04:52] So speaking of Parler, I do have to ask a little bit about what’s been going on this, and frankly, we could probably take up an entire segment or two or three on this topic alone here, but Google, Apple, Amazon, and others. All banning Parler. It’s only one of many recent moves that have had greatly concerned me about what’s going on with the tech giants and how they’re essentially sensor censoring an entire ideology away from their app stores and their social media feeds and everything else.
Talk to me a little bit about this move and what you think the ultimate implications of it are.
Craig Peterson: [00:05:23] I’m sitting down, which is good because it’s absolutely incredible. I call myself an internet originalist, right? You’ve heard of constitutional originalists. We believe in why it was created and the internet.
Remember, I’ve been on the internet since about 81, 82. Before it was, frankly, the internet, and back then it was exciting because finally, we had a way to communicate. We had free speech online. We didn’t have to buy a $200,000 printing press in order to share stuff, including silly little poems that we add back then. We were into Monty Python.
It was a different world. It was really evolving, nicely. Although the internet was designed to resist a nuclear attack, so we could lose an entire city, major city, you name it doesn’t matter. We could still continue to communicate because it was designed for these research institutions primarily, at the time universities, to be able to communicate with each other. And also with the military for all of the research they were doing.
It was just a beautiful design, amazing what was done with it. Now the problem that we’re seeing. Is that we have companies like Amazon that are in literal control of a good 60% of the internet. Part of the reason the internet was just so resilient is it is by definition interconnected networks.
It was, I’ve got my network of computers and I might be a small company, I might be a big company and we all get together and we pass each other’s data. That’s how it works. It’s not like there’s one big pipe somewhere that nobody’s paying for because it’s all free and the internet should be free, all of these crazy ideas. It’s you name your local internet provider these cellular providers, all of these different companies, they all connect to the networks together and they then route data for other companies through their networks. That’s been part of the problem with Netflix, for instance, that at times is consumed more than half of the internet bandwidth. People got upset because, Hey, listen, I’m just a small rural internet service provider and I’m pulling all of this data through my network not even for people who are paying me. For other people’s customers and it’s been back and forth and we’ll have those discussions again in the future I’m sure with the new Biden administration.
But where we’ve now run into the problem, that we’re seeing, is what happens when Amazon has 60% of the internet, based in Amazon?
Now I’m not talking about people buying and stuff for Amazon.
Matt Gagnon: [00:08:27] Are you talking about their cloud servers and stuff?
Craig Peterson: [00:08:29] Exactly. Exactly. Then with those cloud servers, they built their own extra services. So again, let’s pick on Parler. Parler was not only using Amazon to host computers, which is what a lot of companies do.
They were using Amazon to host their name service so people could find them. They were using Amazon to do queuing for people’s posts. Completely using the queuing services. They were using. Amazon’s database services. They were using Amazon storage services. So now when Amazon kicks them off, all of a sudden they’re out of business because they were a hundred percent dependent on Amazon services. Specifically, Amazon.
Twitter’s in the same boat. Twitter is almost entirely inside the Amazon services.
So you now have these huge companies and GoDaddy’s other example, right? Who pulled many conservative sites DNS, domain name service, but these huge companies control so much of the internet. They can say, no, we’re deplatforming you.
If enough of them get together, and frankly, sometimes all it takes is Amazon. Even Amazon saying we’re not going to allow your data to pass through our networks can put you out of business. It’s great that some small internet service provider up in Idaho said forget about it. We’re not carrying Facebook’s traffic or Twitter or some of these other sites anymore.
But they really aren’t going to impact anyone except for their customers. We’re in big trouble.
Matt Gagnon: [00:10:12] All right. That’s Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us at this time every Wednesday, as he always does to go over the world of technology, including technology in space.
Thanks a lot, Craig. Appreciate it. Good luck on Saturday, as always. Make sure you tune in and listen to that here on WGAN one o’clock and we’ll talk again next week, sir.
Craig Peterson: [00:10:27] Take care, Matt.
Matt Gagnon: [00:10:28] All right. Thanks.
Craig Peterson: [00:10:29] Can’t believe it’s been another week. Man, time is just flying now. It seemed like the election was years ago.
As well as of course, all of these things that have been going on, it was dragging for so long, because of the lockdown. Now things are just flying. It’s just, wow, incredible.
Have a great day.
We are finishing up on what we’re now calling our Introduction to Windows Security course.
That will be out very soon. Keep an eye out for that.
Take care, Everybody. We’ll be back.
Bye-bye.
—
More stories and tech updates at:
Don’t miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:
Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:
For questions, call or text:
855-385-5553
