Craig discusses a new home security device from Ring. The always-on home cam — get this… it is a drone. Then he talks about Elon Musk and his 25,000 Completely Autonomous Tesla he will have in 3 years. Plus, you better think twice, or three times before paying that ransom to get your data back.
For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit – CraigPeterson.com
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Right To Repair Or A Fight For Survival?
Ring’s latest security camera is a drone that flies around inside your house
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Elon Musk reveals plans to slash electric battery costs, build $25,000 Tesla
Paying ransomware demands could land you in hot water with the feds
Windows 10 machines running on ARM will be able to emulate x64 apps soon
‘It Won’t Happen to Me’: Employee Apathy Prevails Despite Greater Cybersecurity Awareness
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A Guide to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework
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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:
You’ve been looking for a home security system. We’ve talked about a few of them on the show before. Right now we’re going to be talking about a completely different approach to home security and what Ring’s latest camera is all about.
Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining me.
Okay. Ring has been around for a while. As I recall Ring was purchased, two, three years ago by our friends over at Amazon. They have some interesting security stuff and they’ve certainly had their fair share or share of computer problems, security problems here over the years who hasn’t, right?
This is what’s being called a true ambitious new home security device. This thing is really cool. It sits there. It just, it says Ring on the front. it’s just a little square almost. The device has got rounded corners, so looks very nice. And it’s got a little light button on it.
One of those little Rings, which is always cool, but it’s called the always home cam. And this thing reminds me a little bit of a movie that I’ve enjoyed many times called Tron from way back when. You might even remember these flying T things, although they had two legs on them and they flew around, that’s what this Ring looks like.
It is an autonomous and manual little Quadrocopter, and it is designed where all of the blades are completely hidden if you will. So they’re not going to run into anything. They’re not going to hurt anything or anyone and hanging beneath these four enclosed blades is a thing like a pack of gum. You remember the old packs of gum, the long thin ones. That’s it looks like underneath these four blades. So the idea is you pay them 250 bucks and you plug this thing in, you’re going to have to configure it obviously, but it is this little, I guess a Quadrocopters, how I describe it that sits in its charging base.
Now, when it’s in the charging base, it’s the tail, the long downward part of the T that sits completely immersed in the charging base.
So this charging Base goes all the way up around the base of the Quadrocopter. And it’s just the blades that are exposed on top. What it has on that is a camera. I imagine it probably also has a microphone. It doesn’t say, but it has a little camera. So when it’s in the dark it’s charging and that camera is not active.
Even if it was it wouldn’t be able to see anything. But what’s really cool about this thing is that it can provide you with viewpoints throughout your house. You don’t need multiple cameras anymore. The Rings founder’s name is Jamie Siminoff. And he’s also the chief inventor said that Ring has spent the last two years called focused on the development of the device.
And that it is an obvious product that is very hard to build. And thanks to advancements in drone technology. Ring pulled it off. They’re not available yet. It’s called the “always home cam.” So I’m keeping an eye out for this thing. It is quite cool. It, you can program it what path to take, where it can go.
When you first get it, you build a little map of your home for it to follow. And it asks you for specific viewpoints, such as the kitchen or the bedroom, and the drone can be commanded to fly on-demand or programmed to fly when a disturbance is detected. So you might have a Ring alarm system you in that might include a window opening sensor door, opening sensor. So this little drone can fly up in the air. When it detects someone trying to break in and off it goes, isn’t that cool? The drum makes an audible noise when it’s flying. Of course, it’s small and it’s got all these little blades for little blades. So it’s obvious when footage is being recorded.
I’m looking at a picture of her right now. It’s very cool. Indoor only it’s got high Def Ten-Eighty P video. It only records when it’s in flight, the propellors are enclosed and integrates with the Ring alarm. So if you are a Ring fan, Check it out. If you’re looking for home security, it is not a bad thing.
If you are a business, do not buy Ring. Okay. Because there are real security problems with some of these devices. They are not certified for use in any business that has any federal contacts. In the near future, it’s all being disallowed. So just keep that in mind as well. If you’re looking to buy security stuff. Also the cheap security stuff we have found backdoors in. Chinese spies that they’re just getting in and they are messing around. So be careful of the Panda out there that is the bottom line.
Now we were talking about Teslas earlier, autonomous cars, electric cars. I got to add this. I was thinking about it as we were talking, but Elon Musk announced just about two weeks ago some amazingly aggressive plans. He has built a big battery plant. You probably know about that. I think that was in New Mexico or Nevada. I can’t remember. Might be in Nevada. His whole goal behind all of this is to just slash the costs of producing batteries. And he says, Elon Musk, that is that within three years, he’s going to have a fully autonomous electric vehicle for $25,000. Isn’t that absolutely amazing?
Now they were expecting that he would be announcing a million-mile battery, which would be, wow! If he had a million-mile battery and a $25,000 Tesla, I would buy it. I would sell some of the other cars and buy them. They also announced a car that has over a 500-mile range. You’re going to have to use one of their supercharge to get that thing charged back up again. But it’s absolutely amazing.
Could you imagine that a $25,000 electric vehicle battery operated to the market within three years now, the other giveaway from this, because he said it would be autonomous that means, by the way, he has a goal of an autonomous vehicle within three years? So that’s another thing to consider.
So the model asks the three, my daughter just bought a Tesla Model three, and she’s barely used it yet, but she’s absolutely loved with it. It is cool. There’s no doubt. It is very cool, technology here.
I got to hit this before the hour runs out and that is that paying ransomware could land you in jail. This is a fascinating article, came out in about a week ago in ARS Technica, and Dan Golden wrote this thing, but I agree with him.
I have many times had to advise people not to pay ransoms for their data and most of the time I have to admit they went and they paid the ransom.
Even these companies that say that they can get your data back by scripting it, breaking the encryption, et cetera. Even those companies, well, a large percent of them, not all of them, the percentage of them are actually paying the ransom behind the scenes.
So you pay them 50 grand and they pay the 20 grand 40 grand ransom and they make a cool 10 grand right off the bat.
Right now. I’ve got to also mention that there are a couple of websites out there that are dedicated to helping you break the encryption on ransomware. If you do have your data ransomed, now I’m talking about its encrypted and they say, if you want to ever see it again, you pay us. That’s different than having ransomware to actually extortion saying, we stole all of your data. Then we encrypted it. And unless you pay this extortion money, not only are you not going to get your data recovered on your computers, but we are going to release everything that we stole, which is your client lists, on and on. We’re going to release that to the worldwide internet.
Most companies say, Oh no, don’t do that. we’ll pay, we’ll pay. I can understand that. Statistics I’ve seen right now, I think it’s a little less than 50% of companies are paying the ransoms.
Now, part of the reason when I say not to pay the ransoms is you, don’t want to encourage these guys. They are stealing your data. You have your intellectual property that you have spent a lifetime building, right? Or a career building it’s not something that really they should be having access to and you don’t want to encourage them. One of the things that these bad guys have found. Is, if they can get you to pay a ransom today, they can get you to pay a ransom in a couple of weeks. So they’ll try and hit you again because it takes most companies a while. And to bring in security managed security company like mine takes a while to get everything locked down.
Usually what we’ll do in that case, is we’ll come in, just lock the heck down then try and restore them from backup. Hopefully, their backups are good. I got to say 80% of the time, the companies that think they have backups do not have good backups and it can’t all be restored. Plus the time it takes to restore them, you got to factor all of this in. Treasury Department officials said in an official advisory published last Thursday that these bad guys are part of as designated sanctioned nexus, which means you are paying a ransom to an organized criminal or to a blocked person list. There prohibited lists, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, other countries that it is forbidden for you to do business with. So guess what ends up happening then if you pay ransoms law enforcement officials can now charge you. The treasury department, says they’re going to. So keep an eye out for that.
Make sure you stick around because we’ll be back here after the top of the hour.
Check out my website, Craig peterson.com. There’s a whole lot of information there as well for you.
And we’re going to talk about the future of computers and it has nothing to do with Intel, nothing to do with AMD, at least the way it looks right now.
So stick around and we’ll tell you about upgrading your Windows machine or your Mac because it’s all changing.
You’re listening to Craig Peterson.
Stick around.
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