Welcome!
For being locked down do to this Pandemic there is certainly a lot of technology in the news this week. So lets get into it. I will give you my take on a recent federal court ruling about the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and website terms of use policies. We will discuss the many risks that medical device manufacturers are introducing into hospitals, clinics, and patients. We have a couple of stories about Apple, first off they are ditching INTEL and designing their processors and why the fake news media is so eager to announce problems with their architecture even when it does not exist and much more. So sit back and listen in.
For more tech tips, news, and updates visit – CraigPeterson.com
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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:
Craig Peterson: Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here another week with the Corona virus, I guess. Well, the latest coronavirus, right? This one is it called? Corona, SARS two. Cause it’s another version of the SARS virus. Hey Craig Peterson, here on WGAN heard every Saturday right now from one till 3:00 PM and we talked about the latest in technology.
[00:00:30] The things you need to know, things you can do. We kind of have a little bit of fun too. Sometimes we’ll get into the real stuff that’s serious and sometimes we just talk about some of the cool things and. Well, some things that I like to with the family and all of that sort of thing. And today, of course, is not an exception.
[00:00:50] We’ve got, of course, these SBA loans, and you might’ve heard me bellyache about these because, of course, they’re just not working. Uh, you know, I have a very small company and at the very least, I was supposed to get this little loan that every business that applied was supposed to get, and he supposed to get it within 72 hours. Blah, blah, blah. From the SBA and to date I’ve gotten absolutely nothing and it’s been weeks. And to top it off, I got an email from them a couple of weeks ago that was really ambiguous and saying that maybe I needed to provide some more information. We called them up to try and find out what’s up.
[00:01:32] Things just don’t work there either. It just gets totally, totally messed up. So for me and some businesses obviously, you know, like big ones have gotten millions of dollars, including schools, universities, et cetera. And the little guys that really need the money, we just aren’t getting anything.
[00:01:55] Welcome to the club if you’re one of them. If you’re not, I’d love to hear from you. How did you make it work as a small business? Yeah, you can just email me@craigpeterson.com I would absolutely love to know. And then to top it all off, what happens this week? Of course, the SBAs loan system crashes as businesses are trying to apply for this stuff.
[00:02:19] Maybe about another, what was it, 310 billion in emergency funds? It was was supposedly released on Monday or made available on Monday, and the portal course crashed and kept crashing all day long. The bankers who are trying to get onto the system to apply and behalf of the desperate clients couldn’t get anywhere.
[00:02:40] Very frustrating to them. Of course, no integration between the banking systems and the SBA. No integration, easy way for small businesses or even these big businesses that are pretending they’re small businesses. No way for them to be able to get the information out there. And many of them are venting online on social media against the SBA, the small business administration that’s running the program.
[00:03:06] Now I’ve got to give them a bit of a break because I heard a statistic this week too, that the SBA has processed the more of these loan applications in the last, what is it, a month than they have in the last 15 years, which is absolutely incredible.
[00:03:26] American bankers association is on Twitter saying they’re deeply frustrated at their ability to access the SBA system. America’s banks can help struggling businesses, you know? When did I say at the beginning of all of this. Based on the amount of money they were talking about and assuming that there were a hundred million businesses. I mean, families, excuse me, a hundred million families in the United States. Somebody just do a little quick math here. 100, one, two, three, one, two, three that’s a hundred million. Then times 60, one, two, three $60,000 dollars per family, lets see three, three, one, two, three, $6 trillion, which was the estimated cost of the actual first bailout.
[00:04:14] You know, you heard 2 trillion and 3 trillion. The actual bottom line was actually 6 trillion. So what we’re really, what we’re really talking about here is the ability. For the federal government to have given every family in the country $60,000 can you imagine that? What would that do to the economy?
[00:04:37] Giving every family in the country $60,000 dollars. Now remember too, that you are on the hook as a family for $60,000 that were given to all kinds of businesses that probably didn’t need the money in the first place. And businesses that were, you know, a friend of this Congress critter, that Congress critter. You saw what Nancy Pelosi snuck into the bills.
[00:05:03] The Republicans kept saying, they’re trying to keep this clean. Let’s just get this to small businesses. And of course, the way they set it up, the way they did it just didn’t work either. Man is this is just me. Absolutely. Is it just me? Um. Yeah, the program first went in April 3rd it, and it’s supposed to help the neediest businesses, these really small businesses, hair salons, coffee shops, dry cleaners, and businesses like mine.
[00:05:31] And of course, it just didn’t happen. Its Beyond frustration here for me and for pretty much everybody else. So these truly tiny businesses like mine are gone. They really, most of them are gone. I’ve seen estimates this week saying that it was probably in the order of 25% of them will never be back. And I was talking with one of my daughters this week and a restaurant in our neighborhood that has been here for almost ever.
[00:06:06] A very old business. Uh, that restaurant, the building is haunted. It has been around for a hundred plus years, maybe 200 years. I’m not sure. Very, very old buildings. It’s been a Tavern, et cetera, over the years. And he said, there’s no way he’s reopening. He just can’t reopen. You know, he’s been struggling for years.
[00:06:28] It’s a tough business to be in any ways, in the restaurant business, and I’ve seen stats on restaurants saying that we could see a 50% decrease in the number of restaurants. Number of restaurants, just an entirely here, 50% I don’t know what the numbers are going to be. Um, Dallas. Here I, there’s an article from, uh, the Dallas eater saying that Dallas restaurants opened in our May 1st is a bad idea.
[00:07:00] Market watch has a thing about this as well. My state is reopening businesses, including restaurants and movie theaters. Am I selfish if I go?Many U S restaurants say PPP loans don’t meet their needs. Yeah, no kidding. Right? Even if you get the money. You’re supposed to spend three quarters of it on payroll and you’ve already laid off your people, how are you going to get them back?
[00:07:23] Because they’re making more money. As laid off people on unemployment insurance, and they would be, if you hired them back. So they’re not going to reopen, and then you got to consider, well, okay, payroll was this much, but they were also getting tips which subsidized it because restaurant workers, many of them of course, making just to two or three bucks an hour.
[00:07:46] This is a disaster. It is an absolute disaster. I don’t know how many people are going to end up dead because of the consequences of what we did to try and slow down the Corona virus. And I’m glad we’re able to slow it down. I don’t know. Ultimately if flattening the curve is going to help, because you remember the whole idea behind flattening the curve was we did not want to overwhelm our medical system.
[00:08:17] We didn’t want the hospitals to be overwhelmed. Because we wanted the hospitals to be able to treat people that had this Corona virus. And they certainly were able to, we’re seeing hospitals now, especially small rural hospitals closing down. Some of them may never open their doors again and they’re not closing down because they were too busy.
[00:08:37] They’re closing down because it didn’t have enough income because they weren’t doing elective surgery. A their beds weren’t even close to being full with Covid patients. Some of them only had a couple of Covid patients in them. So what, what , you know, um, and we’ve already had people who have committed suicide.
[00:08:56] I’m aware of one, personally because of losing their job and now they had to pay the mortgage. They had to pay all of their other bills. They didn’t have the money. The government was dragging their feet on it. And then the money that the government’s been spending that did not end up in our hands, that money now is not only money we have to pay back, but it’s going to drive up inflation. And what’s that going to mean?
[00:09:21] Well, It could mean, well, the antidote for inflation from a typical economic standpoint is well you raise interest rates. Do you remember raised interest rates in the eighties early eighties? I had friends who lost homes because the only loan they could get on their home was a a variable interest rate loan. And so they had one of these variable interest rate loans and the interest rate got up into the twenties. I think I remember it being like 22-23% there it there in the early eighties. And so their monthly payments. Just went up. Doubled, tripled, quadrupled some people, and they couldn’t afford to keep their home, so they lost their down payments on the houses.
[00:10:05] And people are complaining right now that they cannot get a loan on their home because they don’t have enough of a down payment. So the banks are getting free money. From us., Ultimately, right? Or from the treasury. So the banks are getting free money and some of these banks now we’re looking for 20% down, again, which is what I had to do years ago when I bought my home.
[00:10:27] I never only ever bought one home. So man, things are going to be a mess. They are going to be a very, very big mess. Um. We’ll see. In the Financial times, many U S restaurant’s highly likely to return the small business aid. I was kind of interested in article denied by insurance companies. LA restaurants are waging a high stakes battle in court now because they had coverage.
[00:10:56] It was supposed to cover this stuff and did it? No. Okay. Um. The many privately owned restaurants are saying the Paycheck protection program fails to meet their needs. Oh my goodness gracious. Um. This is, it’s very ill suited for their industry from my industry, for most industries.
[00:11:19] Basically, if you’re a big enough business that you have a full time HR department, an accounting department, you probably could get the paycheck protection program. If you’re a small business like me. And things are probably not so good for you, so, huh, man. Anyway, stick around. We’ll get into the tech. I promise you’re listening to Craig Peterson here on WGAN stick around because we’ll be right back.
[00:11:55] It kind of sounds like the national restaurant association show here with Craig Peterson, on WGAN. And I was thinking about my, uh, my favorite local restaurant. I love Mexican food. I have ever since I lived in Californ-i-a all of those years ago, out on the left coast. My wife, in fact, the native born Californian, and it, uh, it, I’m, I’m looking at them saying, how are they surviving.
[00:12:24] Cause we would go over there once a week at least, you know, taco Tuesday type thing and enjoy ourselves. Have a nice little family outing. I haven’t spent a dime there in six, eight weeks. I don’t know how long it’s been. It’s been a very, very long time, so I just don’t know. Anyways, let’s get in. Let’s get into the, um.
[00:12:45] The stories for today, and we’re going to talk about something that I think is really, really important. Uh, and of course, what else should we talk about? Right? But, uh, we’ve got, yeah, that was a drum roll. We’ve got an interesting problem right now. There is a law on the books right now that are inplace and has been in place for about 30 years, and it has to do with the definition of hacking. What is hacking, and it made sense about 30 years ago.
[00:13:22] Nowadays, it really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Because we’ve got these terms on websites. So for instance. We’d talked about two months ago about a company that was scraping all of the information they could find about us, including our, our pictures, our video, our voices. But primarily they were after our pictures and from every site they could get their hands on from any site whether or not they were violating the site’s terms of service. And some of these sites have sued them, et cetera. They’ve been hacked, and I guess that’s what happens when you become a big target. But where should it be going? What should we be doing? We’ve got a problem right now, and there’s a lawsuit that’s been initiated by a group of academics and journalists, and of course the ACLU is behind it.
[00:14:18] And you know, most of the time I look at what the ACLU is doing and wonder what it is they’re up to. In this case, I think they might actually be doing something right. Isn’t that nice for a change. They’re arguing. That having these investigations against racial discrimination in online job markets by creating fake accounts for fake employers and job seekers.
[00:14:49] Is that something that should be done? Right? Leading job sites out there in terms of service that prohibits that, right? So users of these sites are prohibited from supplying fake information, and the researchers are worried that the research could expose them to criminal liability. Because they’re posting these things on the site and then they’re trying to analyze all things being equal.
[00:15:14] Was this a case of racial discrimination? So in 2016, they sued the federal government, and they’re asking for whether a decision based on what they’re saying is the First Amendment that you could in fact do almost anything online and get away with it. Now, I, for instance, you know, I have been using fake information on websites for a very long time, so when I go to authenticate myself, you know, they’ll ask, what street were you born on? What’s your mother’s maiden name? I always make stuff up for that and I record it. So that later on I can always dig it up because you know someone can go online, they can become your bestest to Facebook friend. They can look at LinkedIn, find out about you and your history. And the younger kids these days have all of the information online and will for their entire lives.
[00:16:17] So I have always used different email addresses, different versions of my email address, completely different names made up everything. Now obviously. When it comes to an official thing, like a bank account or government stuff, I’m not lying about anything except for my authenticity to be able to log into the site.
[00:16:42] So I’ll give my correct social security number, et cetera, et cetera, when it is required, because obviously would be a violation of a law, but they’re saying. That under this federal law that’s out there, the computer fraud and abuse act, it’s been around for 30 years. Would it be illegal to create these accounts where we’re just trying to figure out, are these people discriminating. So there is a federal judge by the name of John Bates who ruled on Friday a week ago, that the plaintiff’s proposed research would not violate the CFAA, the computer fraud and abuse act provisions at all. And he said that somebody violates it when they bypass an access restriction, like a password, but someone who logs into a website with a valid password does not become a hacker simply by doing something prohibited by a web site, terms of service.
[00:17:45] So that I actually, I think was a good ruling here. Now from the ruling itself, criminal is criminalizing terms of service violations, risks, turning each website into its own criminal jurisdiction and each webmaster into its own legislature. Yay. At last. Right now, unfortunately, courts are disagreeing about how to interpret this.
[00:18:12] If this law is around forever. In Oh nine the California federal judge, right? What else? Ninth circus rejected a CFAA prosecution against a woman who contributed to a, myspace hoax that led to the suicide of a 13 year old by the name of Megan Meyer. And in that, the prosecutors argued that they had violated my spaces, terms of service.
[00:18:40] In 2014 the night circus, uh, rejected another prosecution based on terms of service violation. So obviously I’m in favor of this. They’re kind of moving in the right direction. We’ve got the seventh circus, uh, ruled that an employee had violated the anti hacking law when after quitting his job, he wiped an employer owned laptop that contained information that was valuable to his employer.
[00:19:08] As well as the data could have been revealed misconduct by this person. So I think most of the way we’re talking about the courts coming down the right direction here, but, uh, I, I’m very glad to see this because you know, that I. Protect site against hackers and hacking, not just websites, but businesses, right.
[00:19:30] Including a real enterprise is real big businesses and I’ve done that for years. Usually the smaller divisions, because even the public companies have their own it staff and you know, they hold it all very close to the chest. It’s in tasks. I don’t trust anyone else. Don’t, don’t go with that person. Don’t do what they say.
[00:19:50] Yeah. Right. Which is, or I kind of get it cause I’d probably be saying the same thing, right. Cause I know what I’m doing, but in many cases they’re just trying to protect their jobs. So when I am. Doing this. One of the things we do is have a honeypot set up. So what happens is the bad guys get onto a network and they started attacking.
[00:20:13] They’re immediately going to get into the little honeypot and the honeypot looks like an unpatched system. Might be a Linux system. Usually it is, or it might be a windows system, and so they start hacking away at it. And that immediately just sets off a trip wire, right? Cause I know, wait a minute, wait a minute.
[00:20:33] Somebody’s breaking into this system. So we monitor pretty closely. We know what’s happening on it. I basically, all of the time, and there were interpretations of that law that would say that what I was doing was illegal. It was part of security research, even going on to the dark web and downloading some of these databases of hacked accounts.
[00:20:55] Passwords, usernames, emails, et cetera. Even going online, looking for my client’s information on the dark web could be considered to be illegal, so we’ve got to update these laws. There’s a whole lot more, obviously, that we have to update, but I’m glad to see some of the stuff coming down on the right side.
[00:21:15] Hey, we’ve heard about companies moving back to the U S now because of the Ruan virus and other things China’s been doing. To our U S corporations for years. Uh, did you know Apple is doing something completely differently to this year that will potentially get them out of China, at least for the most part, stick around.
[00:21:38] We’ll be right back. This is Craig Peterson here on w G a N and online@craigpeterson.com.
[00:21:54] Hey, welcome back. Craig. Peter sawn here. Listen to me on w. G. A. N I’m heard every Saturday from one till 3:00 PM and on Wednesdays I’m on with Matt during the morning drive time. You can pick me up at about seven 34 or every Wednesday morning as we talk about the latest in the news of technology. Hey, you might’ve heard of Fox con they are a big company based in China.
[00:22:26] They have offices while manufacturing plants, frankly, all over the world. They’ve got factories in Thailand, Malaysia, Czech Republic, South Korea, Singapore, and the Philippines. They also were talking about opening up some plants in Wisconsin. Apparently those never actually opened, but they are. Busy worldwide.
[00:22:49] And Fox con is Apple’s longest running partner in building I-phones and some of the other devices that China makes. I mean, that Apple makes or sells, right, because remember who makes this stuff anymore? Well, Apple hasn’t been making its newest IMAX or not IMAX. I shouldn’t say a Mac pros. Yeah. In the United States.
[00:23:14] Again, not that itself, it’s a contracted manufacturing company, but the Mac pro, the one that came on 2013 as well as the new Mac pro are entirely made in the United States. Now, when we’re looking at things like the iPhone and some of these other devices, yeah, they are certainly manufactured by Foxconn in China.
[00:23:38] In mostly in at Shenzhen China location, but in fact, key iPhone components, according to Tim cook, are manufactured in the United States and then shipped abroad. And then the devices are assembled by Fox con, and then there’s another company called Pegatron in China. Bottom line. What they are doing and what Apple is doing is protecting its intellectual property.
[00:24:08] And we’ve heard of this before, haven’t we? Where companies are in China, China requires them to give all of their intellectual property to their Chinese quote unquote. Partner, right? And Chinese national has to have at least a 50% ownership in it. It’s real problem all the way around, and when we’re looking at what’s happening with the iPhone in the manufacturing in China, things are going to be changing.
[00:24:37] In fact, they’re going to be changing for a bunch of Apple’s devices, including some of their new Mac books. If you’ve ever gotten into some of the hardware details inside of. It’s a Mac books and, and in fact, they’re Mac computers. Over the years, Apple has gone through a few different CPS. They were using the power CPU while before that they were using the murderer, Motorola, the 68,000 based CPS and a very, just an amazing CPU.
[00:25:07] I remember at the time doing some operant system ports to it. It was just amazing. And then they went to Intel and, um. After. I’m not Intel, I mean, power PC, which was an IBM design. Frankly, power chips are the most amazing chips there are. Uh, from a cost perspective and performance. It’s just, they are absolutely amazing, but they run hot and they use a lot of electricity, which is why you don’t want them in a lab.
[00:25:39] Top and Apple was not, or excuse me, IBM was not able to deliver to Apple chips that would meet their power requirements and performance requirements. So Apple said, okay, well we’re going to switch to Intel because Intel promised that they would be able to provide the faster chips and they run cooler, so they’d be better for laptops and things, and they started using Intel.
[00:26:04] And Intel worked out okay. Right now, by the way, uh, Intel is losing the performance war to AMD advanced micro devices. So that’s kind of cool to hear those, you know, those things kind of shift back and forth every once in a while. But Intel has been unable to meet Apple’s delivery requirements, and Apple’s have been pretty tough over the years.
[00:26:25] Look at what Johnny Ives has done with some of the designs, but Apple says, Hey, listen, we need a. Perf performance increase in the processor and we want to choose less juice and give off less heat. Well, those things are all difficult to do for a microprocessor manufacturer. So what Apple decided they would do is they went to an open source CPU design and started with that base and went on from there to have some just absolutely amazing chip designs.
[00:26:58] Now I, I love some of these designs and they’re showing up. But in all of our I-phones, if you have an iPhone or an iPad, you’re using one of Apple’s chips. Uh, the age 12, I think is the latest one. I’m trying to remember, uh, the version numbers, but, but they’re made by Apple quote, unquote. In the U S for the most part, certainly not in China, and they are very efficient from a performance standpoint.
[00:27:27] They’re very fast. So they’ve been doing a very good job with these. Now, I, I talked to a couple of weeks ago about how much an iPhone would cost if it was made in America, and I saw another study that came out last week, so I had to bring this one up because the other one. Wasn’t that clear. They figured it would only be a hundred $200 more.
[00:27:48] So Wes, what RAs? Why Lara? This is from fi.org. You’ll find this article online, uh, which is the foundation for economic education. And this is an article by Mark Perry. He’s saying that an iPhone that today costs about a thousand dollars if it were made entirely in the United States, if it even could be, because believe it or not, the United States has fallen behind.
[00:28:21] In manufacturing technologies because we have blood, China get ahead of us. We gave them all this technology to start with. I’ve complained about that before too, and now they are ahead of us, so we don’t even have the ability to manufacture these things here in the U S right now, we not only have to ramp pump, but we’d have to develop some new technologies and.
[00:28:45] That thousand dollar iPhone that is assembled in China that has some component parts made in the United States would push the price of an iPhone components from about 190 $190 that’s what it costs right now. Estimated, right? Apple doesn’t release these numbers, but estimated to cost $190 right now, it would be about $600 if it were.
[00:29:12] Made in the us. So if the materials alone are costing better than triple what it would cost in China, we could probably see a $2,000 iPhone. Now, do you remember that the U S is only bringing in 6% of the profits from iPhone sales? Two out of three iPhone purchasers are not based in the United States.
[00:29:38] Now, that’s a huge change from years ago when most of Apple’s customers are in the U S but right now with the whole. A wound virus has been spreading in China. The app, the iPhone sales are way down, and that’s probably also true of other countries as well. So this is going to be an interesting little battle as we go ahead.
[00:30:00] But here’s the really big news as far as I’m concerned, and that is. That Apple is going to start making the Mac book using their chip sets. So like these eight, 12, and other processors I’ve been talking about, they’ve got the, uh, a fourteens are the new ones that are coming out. I think I got that model number right.
[00:30:27] But these are 12 core chips and they are actually. Two chip sets. There’s uh, that, that are in one package. It’s just amazing what they’re doing, but some lower powered ones for doing things that don’t need a lot of CPU power and some higher powered ones. And they’re going to be coming out in the new iPhones and the new iPad, but they are also going to be coming out in the new Mac books now that.
[00:31:01] Is amazing. 12 core CPU is aided by a graphics processor that is probably going to have its own collection of cores. This is amazing. If you look at the current iPad pro tablets that are using the eight 12 X and Z chips, we’re talking about an Apple iPad pro outperforming. 90% of recent PC laptops, so this could be amazing.
[00:31:31] Apple’s moving this, some of this back to the U S and they’re getting Intel out of the way, and I think that’s a good thing, frankly, for Apple. But listening to Craig, Peter sauna, WGAN stick around. We’ll be right back.
[00:31:50] Hello everybody. Welcome back. Craig. Peter Assan here on w G a N having a good time today. Hopefully you guys are as well, whether you are kind of locked up in the home maybe or any central person like you, me and your, you’re out and about and maybe taking a little time on Saturday too. Work in the yard.
[00:32:12] I appreciate you all being with us today. I have just absolutely amazed here what Apple is doing and congratulations to them now once get into our hospitals cause they’ve been in the news a lot lately. You know, we’ve got people. Who will have the Woodlawn virus, right? Who have the symptoms of this coven 19, which is very bad.
[00:32:39] And, uh, it’s particularly bad for older people. We have seen now covert 19, the average of the average. Age of someone who died, what state was, it was like 82 I can’t remember if that was a single state or if that was a Countrywide, but that is frankly, absolutely amazing. That means it is killing older people, but we’re also seeing other symptoms.
[00:33:07] Now we have, people are getting blood clots. You heard about that athlete that had to have a leg amputated. Again, it’s absolutely amazing here. Uh, hospitals right now, according to the New York times, this is from Wednesday this week saying that airborne coronaviruses detected and woo Han hospitals right now.
[00:33:29] That is not good. Um. It’s man. I’m just going through these articles. It just, it just, I shake my head, but we’re starting to see some electric surgeries coming back to hospitals. Uh, most of these field hospitals that were set up or shut down. Down, they were largely unused and right here, according to the Bangor daily news on Wednesday, we’ve got two bankrupt main hospitals warn they could close in June if they don’t receive stimulus funds and president and Trump has announced that, yes, indeed, our hospitals are going to get stimulus funds.
[00:34:08] But if you heard me at the top of the hour, you heard. You heard me talk about how, uh, you know, we were promised funds too, and we just haven’t gotten any. So it’s, this is going to be a very, very big problem for us all. Uh, and when we’re talking about hospitals, there’s one other angle or that people just aren’t paying attention to right now.
[00:34:30] You know, w we talked about the ventilators. And there w there just weren’t gonna be enough. Right. And here in Maine and all over the country, there were more ventilators than were needed. And that’s true. New York as well. And come to find out, of course they sold 500 ventilators rather than maintain them.
[00:34:52] And instead of ordering more ventilators, what did the government do there in New York? While they just commissioned a plan as to how they were going to ration them, who got. To die, right? That’s socialized medicine for you. If I ever heard the definition of it, a total death panel, but the good news is we didn’t need all of those, but we’ve got the internet of things and we’ve talked about it and I’ve talked about it in my tree trainings and we go into it in some depth.
[00:35:21] In my courses, but the so called internet of things also extends to our hospitals. It’s the internet of medical things, and these devices are going online. Hospitals and medical facilities are really starting to stare this in the phase. And I mentioned when I was on with Matt Gagnan on Wednesday morning this week, that there is a problem been around for a long time.
[00:35:50] I have my first, in fact, a hospital chain as a client was 25 years ago. Maybe. And we were trying to clean things up for them, fix them, network stuff, put some security stuff in place. And what did we find? Well, those those machines, those hospitals, plus all of the clinics that were affiliated with the hospital had old hardware that they just weren’t taking care of.
[00:36:18] These devices that are controlling the systems in the hospitals. Everything from the air ventilation systems through. All of the medical equipment. Think about all of this stuff right from the, the drip machines, the Ivy machines, the ventilators, our the MRE machines, the x-ray machines. Some of these devices are running very outdated operating system.
[00:36:46] Some of them are still running windows 95. Windows XP, windows seven none of which are currently getting patches or updates, and many of them were never intended to go on line at all. Think about that. When, when they were designed the windows 95 and XP. They weren’t thinking about these things being hooked up to the internet or even other networks really.
[00:37:13] They were just kind of standalone systems that sat in a corner and then the programmer said, Hey, listen, we can add, there’s really cool feature. We’ll tie them together. And so doctors can look at x-rays remotely. And so a system that was never designed with network security in mind all of a sudden had a network connection all of a sudden was being used online on a network.
[00:37:35] In a hospital that had never set it up properly in the first place. I really wish more of these medical centers in the hospitals would call me because they need so much help, and many of them don’t even realize it. They, these things have no cybersecurity protection whatsoever, and then the hospital networks are often not even segmented.
[00:38:01] That’s something I teach home users to do. So that’s allowing attackers to enter anywhere in the hospital and move around so they can get to the billing. They can get to all of these machines there. Even being researchers that are saying they have seen hackers inside cardiac pacemaker machines. Think about that one for a little bit.
[00:38:28] How about if it gets onto one of these machines that’s running on an older version of windows or even a brand new one that hasn’t been patched up and they get onto it to a hacker, it may just look like, Hey, this is just another windows 10 machine. I’m going to use it for Bitcoin mining. I’m going to use it for spreading ransomware around.
[00:38:48] You think that might be a problem? So it is now Bitcoin mining instead of watching your cardiac rhythm. Right? And so when I was going to overheat, it’s gonna use up all of the systems, resources. It’s going to spread ransomware throughout the hospital. We’ve seen that again and again and again and again, and we’ve seen that again and again in , even in our state, New Hampshire has had this as well.
[00:39:17] I talked to and helped a school district that had been nailed by ransomware and they decided they were just pay the ransom, which by the way. Tells the ransom Merz, Hey listen, let’s hack them again and put another ransom on. Cause we know they pay the ransom right. So there’s third problem the hospitals are having is with all of this vulnerable equipment.
[00:39:40] They’re not replacing them. They’re not upgrading, and they’re not patching them. And not enough of this equipment has been recalled by the manufacturers because the manufacturers have gone on to a newer model, Hey, listen, uh, no need to update that machine or buy a new one for only $50,000. So where are the manufacturers spending their time?
[00:40:03] Where are they focusing their efforts? Well, obviously they’re focusing their efforts on getting them to buy a new machine to design these new machines. It is a very, very big, big deal. Now, another one of the big attacks, most common, I mentioned ransomware when it comes to the intranet of medical devices, but.
[00:40:26] The other big one is a distributed denial of service attack. Cause you remember these devices in the hospital are performing critical. Things, right? Very critical functions that, as I said, there might be running a cardiac machine on MRI. They might just be keeping track of doctor’s notes, all of which are critical.
[00:40:49] So if a nation state specifically targets an IV pump and changes the dose of medication, what do you think will happen? It certainly could happen, but the more basic thread is. These devices getting a denial of service attack. So the whole network at the hospital becomes overloaded and now nothing works at the hospital.
[00:41:18] So there’s, there are just the basic threats that aren’t being taken care of. Ransomware, phishing emails, and these attacks are targeting the weakest and the oldest operating systems that are typically running on these devices and hospitals are top targets. Now, one of the big hacking groups out there that has ransomware all over the world said, Hey, listen, in this time of covert 19.
[00:41:44] We are not going to be attacking the hospitals because it just isn’t fair. And in fact, they have been attacking hospitals. They are the top targets still for ransomware because they’re very vulnerable and they pay. And that’s why, what was it, five years ago? Seven years ago? I designed a system just to, it’s a small computer.
[00:42:09] Based on a little in Intel Adam chip that sits in front of these devices for manufacturers, for controlling valves for more critical equipment. It just sits there. And it is a specialized firewall for that piece of equipment. So this is a problem. It’s a very, very big problem in hospitals, frankly, are afraid to do anything because they’re afraid they’re going to get sued.
[00:42:37] Their insurance companies are sitting there saying, Oh yeah, yeah, well, if you’re going to do an upgrade, the equipment might not work. Properly and you might get sued. So we’re going to increase the fees for our, for our services, for our premiums. Premiums are going to go up. Okay. So they just don’t want to do anything.
[00:42:58] And then you got the FDA right? Man, does this story ever end? And, uh, FDA is saying, Hey, listen guys, we’re okay with you doing patches, the hospitals afraid of recertifying. And I love this quote here. Uh, it says it’s a willful lie on the part of some stakeholders in the system that you can’t update medical devices.
[00:43:25] Why do you think that. W why do they think that? Well, bottom line is that. These device manufacturers are telling them, you can’t update because your insurance premiums are going to get too high. The FDA says it’ll have to be read, type accepted for use, et cetera, et cetera. But I want to let you know if you work for the medical community here at any level, the FDA.
[00:43:54] Has post-market guidance that they issued in 2016 and in that, the FDA explained that while federal regulations require manufacturers to report certain actions, the majority of the actions taken by manufacturers to address cyber security vulnerabilities and exploits are generally not considered to be a type of device enhancement for which the FDA.
[00:44:21] It does not require advanced notification or reporting. So some good news there, we’ll let the hospitals know. If you’re involved with this industry, guys, pull up your socks. Hire security specialist. Some of them have been doing it for awhile. That can really help you out because there’s so much to know.
[00:44:40] Hey, you’ve been listening to Craig Peterson and WGAN and online@craigpeterson.com stick around.
[00:44:51] Hello everybody. Greg Peters song here. We of course are on every Saturday from a one until three and I’m on with Matt Gagnan as well on Wednesday mornings during drive time at about seven 34. I’ve been in the tech business now for many decades, and then the security business helping businesses secure their internet connections.
[00:45:16] Really since 91 and I have quite a backstory, and one of these days we’ll have to have to share it with you, but I’m a business guy and this whole security thing, you know, back in the day. I did not really understand security, probably like a lot of you guys and uh, but I was very, very technical. I had helped to implement a number of the protocols that are used on the internet and that was a big win for me because I was able to take what I knew, dig into it.
[00:45:47] It took me a few days to figure out what had happened and then lock things down and I was kind of years behind at that time. Point because the, what I got, which was called the Morris worm, had actually been known for a few years before it hit me. And that was kind of a shame. So, you know, back then, of course you didn’t have Google.
[00:46:09] AltaVista wasn’t around yet. None of this stuff was out there. We were using a gopher search engines, right. Or Veronica, Archie, Jughead back in the day, and trying to figure it out was really a bit of a chore. Once I figured it out, it was easy enough to fix, but I almost lost my business over that and that was a very scary occasion for me.
[00:46:29] So I have really kind of dug into it, and I’ve been helping out a lot of businesses here over the years to help be secure, and I’m doing the same thing as well. For individuals. And that’s what this show’s all about, right? We’re trying to help you guys out with that. Talk about some latest cool technology.
[00:46:48] And, uh, I was so successful in being able to help outfit, I was even drafted by the FBI’s InfraGuard program and trained, I’ve trained thousands of businesses literally here across the nation on what. To do in order to keep safe, and I continue to do that with free webinars, courses, memberships, all that sort of stuff.
[00:47:10] Anyhow, if you miss the first hour today, I talked about a change here in the way criminal hacking is being looked at by our courts, and that’s. Very good things about time. They changed that Apple is going to be selling max with its own processor starting in 2021. Say goodbye to Intel, and I would add to that.
[00:47:34] Good. Riddens uh, also the internet of medical things. You’ve heard me, if you’ve been listening to me. Uh, you’ve heard me talk a little bit about the internet of things. Well, there’s something called the internet of medical things as well, and that is frankly very, very scary. So that’s how we ended up last hour.
[00:47:56] And I want to invite everybody to go online. Go to Craig peterson.com you will see all of the articles I talk about today with all of the background. You can listen to my podcasts, you can watch my videos every once in a while. I even have some trainings. Up there, but if you sign up, you can get my weekly newsletter, which does contain all of that stuff.
[00:48:19] Craig, Peter, sawn.com/subscribe so you can just get out your phone. It’ll work on your phone. It’ll work on your desktop, on your laptop. Craig Peterson. Now I saved Craig Peterson because it’s an O. N it’s not an E. N, it’s N. O. N. Alright, so it’s Craig, CRA, I G just like you’d expect Peter sohn.com/subscribe and I do not.
[00:48:46] I do not pass to you. In fact, when I have something that I am launching, you know, a new, a new course, a new product, whatever it is, I will give you the option to opt out of that. If you’re not interested in it, and I, I, you know, just click right there and you’ll still get my weekly newsletter. But you won’t hear anything more about that particular promotion that’s going on at the time.
[00:49:09] So I’m not like some of these marketers that just slam you every day. I don’t even consider myself a marketer. Right? I’m a tech guy that happens to have something to sell, not quite the same thing. Anyhow. Um. Yeah, w and the plenty of free stuff. A lot of people just use the free stuff and that’s all they need.
[00:49:30] We have a report that’s been in the media that I want to talk about right now, and this is a report about this so-called zero day exploit against iOS. Now, what is zero day exploit? Basically. Uh, what we’re talking about when we say zero day means, uh, it’s kind of like patient zero, who was the first person to get the Corona virus as an idea, right?
[00:49:57] That’s patient zero zero day here. When we’re talking about some of these hacks means no one has seen this particular hack before, at least no one was aware of it. Now, sometimes the government agencies. Of our government and other foreign governments, we’ll find something out. Of course they won’t. Uh, they won’t tell us about it.
[00:50:20] Right. They’ll just kind of use it. That has actually changed under the Trump administration. President Trump has been adamant that they share this information. I’m sure that keeping a couple of things back, but the NSA even has been sharing information about exploits that are going on. So we’re funded about more and more of them, but in this case, there is supposedly an exploit that’s out there in the wild.
[00:50:46] And then the wild means it is being used. It has been seen out there. And this particular exploit is supposed to be used just by sending out a specially crafted, uh, email. Okay. And I’m supposedly, I saw another article that was saying, Oh, it’s especially triggered SMS, a text message or message message or something.
[00:51:11] So there’s a San Francisco based security firm named Zach ops, and they said on Wednesday that attackers a dues the zero day exploit against at least six targets over a span of at least two years. Well. Now that’s being disputed because Apple is certainly acknowledging that there is a flaw in the mail app, but it is a bug that causes the app to crash.
[00:51:39] It does not give the bad guys access to anything. Basically. So the bad guys, certainly, yeah. They could crash your mail app and it’s just going to restart automatically, or are you going to click it and it’ll re restart right on your iOS device. But in this case, what we’re talking about is something that’s really a whole lot different, a whole lot worse, or is it frankly, right?
[00:52:04] If it’s not giving them access to your data. Is it really worse because it can’t take full control of your iPhone, unlike what some of the media outlets were talking about. So Apple had declined to comment on the report, but they came out and they said that the bug posed a threat to iPhone and iPad users and there had not been any ax exploit at.
[00:52:29] All in the statement they said, Apple takes all reports and security threats seriously, thoroughly investigated. Researchers report based on the information provided have concluded these issues do not pose an immediate risk to our users, and they go on to say that they found these issues in mail that.
[00:52:47] Cannot bypass the iPhone and iPad security protections and no evidence that they’ve been used against customers. Now Apple’s really good too about trying to track what is happening on phones. You might have noticed if you go in complaining about a problem with your phone and you go into the. Oh store.
[00:53:04] They can look at logs on your phone to see if the app has been crashing, et cetera. So yes, indeed, they can check this out and take care of it. There have been a number of independent researchers that have also questioned the conclusion that zinc ops came to, and I think this is good. You know, you’ve got to be out there.
[00:53:26] You’ve got to be talking about these things. Apple did respond. I like the fact that it was all public here. And that people were able to look at it and kind of figure out what was going on. Cause there have been exploits. We know that the WhatsApp app has been nailed a few times and I think part of the reason for that is WhatsApp is supposed to be secure.
[00:53:47] Well, how secure is it. Really, and so they, the bad guys are constantly kind of going after it, trying to prove that it’s just not secure at all. But really they identified a crash report. They found a way to reproduce the crashes and some circumstantial evidence. Told them that may be this was being used for malicious purpose purchase purposes.
[00:54:11] Okay. Um, so, uh, anyways, that’s where that stands. So what to do, obviously keep your software up to date. Apple is very good, unlike again, in this month. Microsoft’s updates ended up causing serious problems. For some people. Apple’s updates rarely cause those types of problems, and when we’re talking about iOS, they just don’t get any easier.
[00:54:39] You can apply them very, very simply. In fact, they will usually, if you have automatic updates turned on on your iPhone or iPad at night, while it’s sitting there on the charger, it’s going to go ahead and update itself, upgrade itself, and then the next morning, Qatar, you’ve got the whole new operating system you had to do.
[00:54:57] Absolutely nothing, which is, man, that is my idea of an easy time, and you’ve heard me before, I’m sure say don’t use Android and people just, I ignored, I don’t understand why. Right? Some of these people, like Danny, for instance, I’m thinking of, he follows. Everything I say to the T and it has saved him again and again.
[00:55:22] In his small business, he has a franchise restaurant and you know, Oh, we’ll see how the restaurant business does, but he’s doing okay right now, but he still uses an Android phone and I don’t get it. You know, I, I’m not really fond of. Any of these big companies, politics, you name the company, the politics are probably bad nowadays.
[00:55:44] You know, it used to be assumed that, Oh, big corporations, they were big, they were evil, they were nasty. And if you notice the Democrats, now they’re not talking about the evil millionaires. They’re talking about the evil billionaires, because of course they’re millionaires, right? To all of them, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, the senators out there in California, Feinstein and others.
[00:56:06] But, um. You know, the these big companies, so many of them are so left-leaning. It drives me crazy, so I get it. If you don’t want to use Apple stuff because you don’t agree politically with Apple, I think that’s an okay reason. But reality sets in. And you just can’t continue to use Android. You really can’t.
[00:56:27] And if you can get off of windows, you should do that as soon as you possibly can. Anyhow, that’s just my opinion. So stick around. When we come back, we’ve got more to talk about. Of course, we’re going to get into a very kind of an interesting problem over at Amazon. You’re listening to Craig Peters on a w G a N stick around.
[00:56:50] We’ll be right back.
[00:56:55] Hey, welcome back everybody. Craig Peterson here on WGAN. You can hear me, of course. Every Saturday from one til three. You also can listen to me on Wednesday morning. Yes, I’m on with Matt Gagnon. Did you know there was a morning show. Yeah. Drive time. So I’m on with Matt every Wednesday at about seven 34 for a few minutes to talk about the latest in technology news.
[00:57:23] And of course we get to spend a couple hours talking about this in more detail on Saturday. Well, we just talked about this iOS zero day bug, and what does that mean to you? Doesn’t look like it’s totally legit. Big, big problem with our medical devices and hospitals and otherwise they are still running windows 95 X P if you can believe that 2007, none of which are supported anymore.
[00:57:55] And, uh, you also went into what. Uh, what really has been put in place out there to allow them to do upgrades and updates, but there’s so much obfuscation. It’s crazy. And then courts violating a site’s terms of service is not criminal hacking. So if you missed any of that, you can find it online. You can just go to Craig peterson.com/iheart I also post this whole show as one podcast that you can find on your favorite podcast platform, whatever that might be.
[00:58:31] By just searching for Craig Peterson. Or the easy way is go to Craig peterson.com/itunes or if you’re like, hi heart, you can go Craig peterson.com/iheart or Craig peterson.com/soundcloud et cetera, et cetera, okay? But it’s all out there and you can get the whole show, all kinds of. Put together for you, which I think makes some sense.
[00:58:57] Amazon is the 8,000 pound gorilla out there. They have been just really taking over the online retail space in a very, very big way. In fact, the Amazon counts for about one third of all. US-based internet retail sales isn’t that huge? Can you imagine having that kind of market share? One third of all of it, but it didn’t get there entirely on its own in case you’re not aware of it.
[00:59:31] Amazon has about half of their items being sold by small businesses, by third parties, and you might’ve noticed that on label sometimes where the third party, uh, will. Ship has something to you directly, and yeah, it looks like an Amazon box and me having an Amazon tape on it. But in reality, what we’re seeing is a return address that might not be Amazons.
[00:59:57] Well, these typically are smaller vendors, so think of that for a minute. We’ve got about a third of all retail sales going through Amazon and about half of those coming from small vendors. That’s a very, very big deal. And with the businesses the way they are today, you might want to consider. Should you be selling online?
[01:00:24] A lot of companies abandoned eBay because of their pricing strategies and they moved over to Amazon and it’s been okay for them over there. But I want to tell you about the problem that’s happening right now at Amazon. And this is something I’ve seen over the years that has bothered me a lot. And I had over the years, a number of friends that had started software companies and some companies that I didn’t even know that were.
[01:00:57] Well, you know, I knew all of them, but I didn’t know the owners. Then they had database software, they had scheduling software. They had a lot of different things, and what Microsoft would do is they’d, they’d keep an eye on the market and they’d say, Oh wait, wow. Wow. That database is doing really well and it’s winning.
[01:01:18] A lot of DTA deals that our database software’s not winning. And the allegations were that what Microsoft was doing was kind of being a predator here cause they would go to the company that had the database software and uh, chat with them and see if the company would sell out at a reasonable price.
[01:01:42] And then this is so anti competitive. It’s crazy. But then. If that company didn’t want to play ball, like sell themselves for super cheap to Microsoft, well, Microsoft was accused of doing and what Microsoft hadn’t been convicted of doing in courts now is they would announce a product that competed directly with the small guy.
[01:02:11] And wait to see who asked about it. So Microsoft would say, yeah, we have a database product for small businesses. Very easy to use. Drag and drop interface. Everything’s going to be great. You are going to love it. And then Microsoft would sit there and see of companies would start calling them and say, when’s your product going to be available?
[01:02:34] What am I going to be able to do this? Well, in some cases they waited a year or more. And they never ever came out with a product. But what do you think happened to Mr. Small guy out there, the small business that had investors where the owners, they were founders had invested thousands of hours into it, maybe their entire life savings.
[01:02:58] Well, people, companies, and I experienced this personally, companies who would sit there and say, well, you know, Microsoft is going to come out with something here. I want to see what Microsoft does. And so that small company. W is now out of business because what are they supposed to do? People aren’t buying, you know, their models were based on so many sales and that was based on the people liking their product and talking about it and the marketing dollars they were spending.
[01:03:29] But that money was going down the drain because Microsoft was there saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ll, uh, we’ll, we’re going to do this. Yeah. Yeah, us, us, us. And so they got sued again and again, and they lost in court, but it was still cheaper for them and then made more money. Think of the billions in cash some of these companies are sitting on and, uh, that is a bad thing to do.
[01:03:52] It really does hurt commerce. It certainly is not free trade. Uh, of course, we live now, I think in a largely a crony capitalist system. And they played that game. They played it very, very well. Well, back to our friends here, Amazon. But yet, you know, those allegations are still floating by the way, about Microsoft and many other companies that appear to be doing that thing in.
[01:04:18] Here’s what happened to them. Amazon. What happened was Amazon started looking at the merchants that were selling third party stuff on their websites, and the wall street journal has a great report on it right now because Amazon has its own in house brands. So it’s making itself a direct competitor to many of these merchants who rely on the Amazon platform to reach.
[01:04:50] Consumers. So now you’ve got your little product. Amazon is selling something that’s similar to yours, or at least competitive with yours, and that’s bad enough. But the wall street journal reviewed some internal company documents that showed that Amazon executives were asking for and getting data about specific marketplace vendors despite corporate policies against doing so.
[01:05:23] Despite the fact that Amazon had testified in Congress that they never did this. And according to the wall street journal, more than 20 former employees told them that this practice of flouting those rules was commonplace. We knew we shouldn’t, but at the same time, we’re making Amazon branded products and we want to sell them.
[01:05:48] So here’s what they were doing. Amazon was looking. At what was being sold out there. And this one example that was given was something that I’ve bought. It’s a car trunk organizer, and apparently Amazon employees access documents relating to that vendor’s total sales. What the vendor paid Amazon for marketing and shipping and the amount Amazon made on each sale of the organizer before the company.
[01:06:20] Then unveiled. It’s own similar product. They’re getting around the rules here. W we’ll get into this when we get back. I’ll tell you about some of these Amazon brands that you might not even be aware are Amazon brands. You’re listening to Craig, Peter sawn here on w G a N every Saturday from one til 3:00 PM cause stick around.
[01:06:43] We’ll be right back. And of course there’s a whole lot more to come today.
[01:06:52] Hey, welcome back everybody. Craig, Peter sawn here. We were just talking about our friends at Amazon. I remember getting really, really upset with them. I sent them a a note, uh, years ago, decade or more, certainly more a go because Amazon decided it would patent something that it called one click ordering.
[01:07:17] As though one click ordering was like some major leap forward and, and, and I couldn’t believe the us patent and trademark office actually gave them a patent because I knew other sites that were doing it as well. It. This whole thing is totally upside down, not just with Amazon, but now you can get patents on almost anything and not, not just, I’m not just complaining about business processes here, business process patents, which, uh, I don’t like.
[01:07:48] Uh, but all the whole patent world, the whole thing has been changed, turned on its head with the new patent laws. It has gotten even worse, not better. Yeah, it makes it easier for the government, but in reality, it I think is hurting a lot of businesses. So let’s see what we’re talking about with Amazon here, where Amazon was combing through the data of these third party vendors that make up for about 50% of the products sold on amazon.com.
[01:08:20] And these employees were accessing the data about what the vendor’s total sales were, and they were getting around the rules by bending the concept of what’s called aggregation according to the wall street journal and well, Amazon says that it did not access individual seller data. It did create reports of aggregate.
[01:08:45] Seller data. And if a pool is large enough, that wouldn’t be a problem. So if you’ve got 200 vendors selling iPhone cases, okay, but the example that the wall street journal is using here is have a trunk organizer. So in reality, how many trunk organizers were there at the time? So this pool of vendors, very, very small.
[01:09:11] And when you’re talking about a group of two entities, uh, okay, it’s aggregated, but what’s that telling them. So what Amazon had done then is they said, Oh, wait a minute. This is a very profitable niche that people who are using our services to sell it are in. So your small business, you come up with this idea of a trunk organizer, and it’s better than any trunk organizer that’s ever been made, and you’re going to add two extra compartments to it.
[01:09:43] I don’t know what you’re going to do right. You’re going to make it very firm, very strong, and it can fold up, fit into a corner. And so you have to make some prototypes. You have to figure out, how do I do this? You might make a trip or two to maybe heaven forbid China or Indonesia or some other country, right?
[01:10:02] Other than China, please. And you go out there for a few times, you. You end up paying, you know, easily 10 $20,000 just to have a stamp made that can stamp out your little product there for the insides. And then you got to get another vendor that had ships to that, that takes the material, sows it all together, and then can ship it out.
[01:10:25] And then you have to have a minimum order sitting there in Amazon’s warehouses ready to go. So you’re into this one a hundred grand, maybe more. Plus all of the time that you spent doing it, which now is lost opportunity costs because you weren’t doing something else while you were trying to design this chunk organizer.
[01:10:50] So you have spent life savings on this. You’ve put it together. If you ever watched shark tank, and you look at some of these people, right? Most of those businesses fail. Even the ones that make it to shark tank. So you’ve done all of this. You had hoped that your business would succeed. Well, you’re selling it.
[01:11:13] It is succeeding. It’s doing well. Maybe you’ve made back $50,000 of that a hundred thousand you put into it and maybe you get up to a hundred thousand Amazon notices. Whoa, this guy’s making a lot of money. Maybe we should get into that trunk organizer business. In fact, we know exactly which models, which colors, which fabrics of his trunk organizer are selling.
[01:11:43] Hm. So Amazon then takes the idea and runs with it. Amazon now has more than 145 private label brands. This is a huge, huge number. There is a website out there called this Justin. TGI research and they have a list of these brands that Amazon has. I’m scrolling through it right now. I had no idea. Most of these were Amazon.
[01:12:18] You know, you’ve heard, I’m sure of Amazon essentials. That sounds like an Amazon brand, right? It is. Amazon basics. Okay. Those are obvious. But there’s others like kids’ clothing line scout and RO women’s clothing, brand, Hayden Rose or furniture line stone and beam. Those are Amazon brands and you can’t tell by the name, and I’m looking at this list over on this, Justin, and they all have their own logos.
[01:12:54] You just, you would have no idea. Brass tacks leathercraft makes leather belts from, guess what those are? Those are Amazon chains. Ditch charming. Dove. Um, Ken sounds like charming Charlie, doesn’t it? Hm. Uh, charm. Z silver. That sounds like chirpy. Oh my gosh. Amazon exclusive. Uh, and then charming Charlie’s is out of business.
[01:13:20] Right. Did you ever go there? My, some of my daughters used to love it cause you can get all of these little hoopy things and necklaces and stuff, but it goes on and on. This is, this is ridiculous. There’s gotta be way more than what, what Tai and what wall street journal is reporting anyways, so they’re saying those private labels account for 1% of Amazon’s total sales.
[01:13:45] That was according to a report last September, and some former employees apparently told the wall street journal that they are operating under the directive that Amazon’s private label sales should be. 10% of the company’s retail sales by 2022 so there you go. You know, we talked about the contentious relationships with eBay in the sellers.
[01:14:11] Contentious relationships with Amazon in the sh in the sellers, the European union’s competition Bureau opened up an investigation against Amazon. This is a very, very bad thing here. Uh, antitrust subcommittee chairman, David Sicilian from Rhode Island in house judiciary committee chair. Gerald Nadler.
[01:14:36] We’re pretty upset about this quote. This is yet another example of sworn testimony of Amazon’s witnesses being directly contradicted by investigative reporting. So yay. At least somebody is doing investigative reporting out there. So I don’t know. What are you going to do? I was upset with Amazon. I told them I’d never do business with them again, and then probably about 10 years later, I started doing some business with them again because it was the only place I could buy some of the things I wanted to buy, but they’ve been using this merchant data not good.
[01:15:10] Not good at all. Well, we have a couple more cool things. We only have a minute or so left here in this segment, but let’s get into this very, very quickly. At least get started. This is from dark routine.com they have a lot of great articles, but consumers and small to medium businesses are likely to fall.
[01:15:31] For Corona virus scams. It said, now, I have seen a lot of emails coming in to me from companies saying that they can get me some of these loans. Uh, I don’t think so. Uh, and I have, I saved some of them. I should put those out in my membership site or in the newsletter. You can see some of them do some training about what is going on, but it’s no secret that these fraudsters are shifting their strategies because it’s like anything else, right?
[01:16:03] Never let, uh, gee, what did, um, the Obama white house say, never let a good. No. Jeepers. Yeah. I’ll remember during break or break coming up here now. Too long, too long a day. Anyways, stick around cause he’ll be right back with our final segment today. We got more to go over and make sure you sign up for my email so that you get that every week.
[01:16:31] Craig, Peter, sawn.com/subscribe you can find out what’s going on, what I’m doing, the different trainings and. No. What’s happening in the world today, especially on the security front. Stick around. We’ll be right back.
[01:16:46] Hi guys. Welcome back. Craig Peterson here. We’ve been talking about everything today, courts and how they are really coming down on the right side here when it comes to a 30 year old law about criminal hacking Apple, they. Are going to be selling Macs with their own processors starting in 2021 the health prognosis on the security of medical devices is very bad, and that’s a shame.
[01:17:19] We’ve got this zero day report of problems with iOS. That’s your iPhone. iPad. Turns out to be false. Amazon’s reportedly using merchant data. That’s what we were just talking about in the last segments or two segments, really, despite telling Congress that it does not use it. So all these poor little companies that are using Amazon to ship their products, Amazon’s looking at all of their sales numbers and everything and then going into direct competition with them.
[01:17:55] Man alive. This is just nuts, right? And it’s not something new. It’s not something Amazon invented. Companies have been doing this for very, very long time. I know a guy, in fact, I interviewed him on my radio show, this is raw a lot of years ago, and he had an electronic store and what he did every year, he’d go out to the consumer electronics show like I did.
[01:18:20] I used to go out every year and I’d record interviews and things. I haven’t done it in a few years now. Just take so much time and it’s such a high cost and you know, I don’t get paid for to doing the radio show, but I always enjoyed it. So he would go out there, he would find the coolest new technologies, and he would talk to these people, say, yeah, I have an electronic store.
[01:18:42] And actually it was a chain. And with my electronic store, I can, uh, you know, I can move all of these things and, and let me sell them. So at the consumer electronics. Show. Most of these companies are small companies, right? Of course, there’s all of the huge guys are out there, but a lot of small companies, and so the small companies would kind of drool and he’d say, okay, well send me a sample and here’s my address.
[01:19:06] So they’d send them a sample and this guy would take that sample and turn around. And immediately ship it over to a buddy of his, the work for him in China, and they would take it around to various Chinese manufacturers and say, Hey, can you duplicate this? And you know, China has known forcement of any laws about intellectual property in this guy, even though he’s based in the U S and I won’t tell you his name.
[01:19:38] Uh, thank goodness he has gone under that lease. Last I checked, his expansion plans backfired on him, but, uh, but he would. Ship them over to China. So this poor small company that’s been working and trying to develop this, they came up with it. They had prototypes made. They were spending all of that money at the consumer electronic show.
[01:20:00] You know, that’s easily going to cost you 10 20 grand when you figure all of your expenses and just to go to the show. And then this idiot was taking his stuff. Uh, taking this stuff from these people immediately shipping it to China and getting it manufactured very, very quickly. I know of other guys too that keep an eye on eBay and on Amazon and other places trying to find products that look really good or even worse.
[01:20:28] I know some guys that hang out on Reddit and some other places. Looking for people discussing ideas, and if the idea seems to be working and they say, Hey, we just got some funding to do X, he would go ahead and, uh, he would bankroll it himself. Have it manufactured in China, completely bypassing these people.
[01:20:51] And of course he already had all of the contacts over there so he could get it done very, very, very quickly and get it shipped back here and before the other guys have even shipped their first product, let alone maybe even getting their final prototypes done. He was selling it. I really, really have a huge problem with that, and maybe it’s my ethics, right?
[01:21:17] Maybe the problem is me and my ethics, I have many times being told that if, if I did not have ethics, I’d be one of the richest men in America. Uh, and I don’t know if that’s true or not, but, um, I know it would be a lot further ahead than I am financially, but I could never live with myself. So when I see this stuff that Amazon’s doing, when I saw the stuff that Microsoft was doing to friends of mine, it just, just really gut checked to me is it’s just bad.
[01:21:51] And now we’re seeing. Small businesses who, if you listen to the first segment today, which was almost two one two hours ago now, I was talking about problems that the small medium businesses are having specialty restaurants and companies like mine because people just aren’t spending, they aren’t going out and doing it, and these companies will never come back.
[01:22:14] We could lose half of the restaurants in the world. Because of this pandemic. So now we’ve got these fraudsters who are sending out emails to small businesses and consumers saying, Hey, um, you, if you do need funding, you know, we can get you the SBA funding. We can get you, uh, individual funding here.
[01:22:37] Coronavirus relief for the individuals and we’re desperate. People are desperate right now. And. You know, they’re, they’re hearing all of this stuff about what should be happening. And frankly, the federal government is changing its mind on what these programs are. It seems daily, you know, you hear the announcement of a program.
[01:23:00] I went and applied for program based on what we were told and. Oh, all of a sudden the agency decides, no, no, no, no. We’re going to change it up here. No, we’re not going to do what president Trump wanted, and that just totally messes up the whole program and the purpose behind it. It’s no bureaucracies, right?
[01:23:23] So we’re desperate right now. I BBMs X-Force IBM has some pretty good software out there for some of the. You know, security stuff, if you want to call it that, right. And IBM X-Force has seen an increase of more than 6000%. 6000% in this Covin 19 related spam. And of course, almost all of that is scammy stuff as well.
[01:23:53] And the, these are fishing lures. They’re aimed to manipulate people. They’re pretending they’re the small business administration, the world health organization that they are U S banks who are, who are offering relief. And, uh, guess what, they, they just aren’t, the FBI has a site out there that I’ve talked about on the show before called dot gov and that is the, um, what’s that stand for?
[01:24:22] It’s the internet. Crime reporting system. Uh Oh yeah. Crime complaint center. I see three. And they’ve seen an increase in reports of online extortion scams because of the stay at home. Uh, they vary. I’m looking at the FBI public service announcement right now, uh, going on and on. Tips, protect yourself.
[01:24:49] It’s just the, it’s the stuff we talk about every week. And I had this week also an FBI pin come in, which is a private industry notification for anyone involved in the airline industry. Because they are coming after us right now. Nation States, the whole nut air line, but air craft industry, it is really bad right now.
[01:25:15] IBM security and Mo and a morning consult pulled 2300 small business owners and members of the general population in early April. And most people had said a lack and understanding of the ways government officials communicate with the public. They’re not going to send you on solicited emails, uh, despite warnings from the IRS for years.
[01:25:39] Now. 35% of the respondents said this is how they expect to receive IRS communications, so you’re not going to be getting covered 19 alerts from the government via email. Okay? It just isn’t going to happen. Stimulus checks are not applied for via email. And that’s a very powerful lure. More than half of IBM securities respondents said they would click on links or open attachments related to the stimulus check eligibility.
[01:26:14] Nearly two thirds of adults who recently launched their jobs would be the most likely to engage with an email related to stimulus relief. Right? Doesn’t that make sense? And what’s happening? The bad guys are coming after us. They’re playing us for the fools. And many of us are falling forward. None of you guys are right.
[01:26:35] You guys are smart enough. You guys are very, very careful and I’ve, I’ve gotten a lot of emails from you guys asking, Hey Craig, is this legit? And I’m fine with that, right? I, I do respond to those. You can just email ME
[01:26:49] me@craigpeterson.com that’s Peterson. With an ON. If you have any of these, try and include the headers so I can see exactly what’s going on.
[01:27:00] But it is a very, very big deal. Now, there’s a couple of articles we can’t really get to today. One’s on Microsoft teams, which of course is being used more and more. We’ve talked about the security problems in zoom. Well, we haven’t really gotten into teams and what they’re doing. And a very good article here on insider threats and most businesses, again, small businesses, you may not be paying attention to this, but almost anybody could be an insider threat.
[01:27:32] And that particularly includes some of your. Uh, your sales personnel, uh, other office staff. But apparently the dark web has really increased the risk of insider threats. So we don’t really have time to get into that today because we are pretty much out of time, but be very, very careful when we install one of our more advanced firewalls where the next generation ones, we always set it up so that the dark web.
[01:28:03] And the ways on to the dark web on to the onion network don’t work right now. We’ve talked about it before. I’ve talked about tore in the onion net now, and I’ve done trainings on that. And there are times when you might want to use it, but if you’re a business, you don’t want people being able to use that.
[01:28:21] So, quick wrap up for today. Violating a site’s terms of service is no longer considered criminal hacking. Thank goodness. Apple is not only manufacturing more stuff in the U S but it’s going to be making its own processors. For max starting next year. The processors that are already in your eye, iPhones and also in your eye iPads are already Apple processors, so I’m interested to see how that works out.
[01:28:54] If you’re in a hospital, particularly a few are managing a hospital or doctor’s office, be very careful because your medical devices are. Typically not secure. And of course I just got upset with Amazon for what they’re doing to cheat small businesses out of what is what is effectively their intellectual property.
[01:29:17] And it’s very bothersome to me. All right, everybody. Have a great week. Make sure you get my weekly emails so that you can follow up on everything we talked about today. Plus there’s more information. Craig peterson.com/subscribe we’ll see you there. Have a great week, and I’ll be back on Wednesday at seven 34 with Matt Gagnon.
[01:29:42] Bye bye.
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