Craig Peterson's Tech Talk

Recommendations to Turn Off Your Printers - eCar Fire Warning Craig Peterson: Hey, we got another emergency patch out from our friends at Microsoft. And in this case, it has to do with printers and remote printer access. Do you have employees working from home? Microsoft has their big monthly patches that they release. They also have weekly patches that they released that are for slightly more critical vulnerabilities. And then they have. Patches that are released because there is a severe problem going on right now while that's what we are staring down. There is a vulnerability called print nightmare, and this is located in the windows print. Spooler serve. Now the windows print spooler services, what it sounds like. This is the service that handles all of your print jobs. So if you are using this service, Turns out there's a serious bug and Microsoft tried to patch it once and failed. [00:01:10] And they've got another patch out right now seems to be working, but organizations are really urged to deploy the

COVID's Biggest Victim? The Traditional Workplace Craig Peterson: Work from home is a huge deal, especially for a couple of segments of our society. And I want to talk a little bit about that now, as employees are returning to work, should they be returning to the office? There is a great article here this last week in Forbes magazine by Dana Brownley. And it was one of their editors' picks, and Forbes picked it, I think, for excellent reason. And that is so many of us have been working from home. And for many of us, it's been a godsend. I've worked from home now for over 20 years. And for me, it's been a godsend because my priority was helping to raise our eight children. And it's hard to do that, and it's hard to homeschool them if you are not at home. So that's what I had done. And I was very privileged to be able to do that. [00:00:54] And our kids have all turned out amazing. Many people are caregivers, and it isn't necessarily just kids. But right now, I'm looking at a survey that was conducted. It's ca

The FBI Weaponized Google Pixel 4a Phones! If you look into buying a used Google Pixel 2a, I've got some news for you. The FBI has been very busy, and they've conned the con man. I love this story.  The FBI has been trying to track bad guys for a very long time, and there've been several ways they've done it. We know obviously about phone taps. We've seen those before the old days. I don't know if you've ever been to one of the original. Telephone switching stations were all not even original, but the types they had in the late sixties and early seventies. I remember going to see one, and all of these switches were going. [00:00:43] People were dialing the phones and everything. It was just so cool. And back then, to trace a phone call, what they had to do is find the original. Sore. So they would go to that row, that column, that exact little unit that was hooked up directly to your phone. And then they would see, okay, this is in position this, and then go to that next switch. [00:01:08] Okay. Position that

How Could Facebook Do a Better Job at Controlling Disinformation? Hello, everybody. Great discussion this morning about Facebook and what is going on with their monitoring and controlling some of the topics. Should they have something in place that really stops false information? How could they do that? And what's their real motivation behind all of this. With Mr. Christopher Ryan, we also got into how the general services administration has completely messed up. Again, it's authorization, this FedRAMP authorization. Why are our federal agencies using some tools like zoom that have been proven to be very insecure, and they're using them with the blessing of GSA, who says they're secure. [00:00:50] So here we go. [00:00:52] Chris Ryan: Craig Peterson is the host of tech talk on news radio 610, 96.7. You can check him out Saturdays and Sundays at 1130. Craig, how are you?. Hey, good morning. Doing great. Appreciate being with us. So one of the topics we did we've delved into today is social media giants and cen

Amazon Is In For a Rough Ride Did you know that Amazon has a new CEO? I remember back in the nineties; I pledge that I would never use Amazon again because they filed and were awarded a patent on technology everybody was using.  Jeff Bezos is out of a job. [00:00:19] This is a guy that grew a company that all they did initially really was book sales, and they had a warehouse the size of the Amazon, right? Because they wanted to represent everybody. They had every book ever published, and to a large degree. They did. They had a whole lot of bucks, and then I've expanded, of course, beyond that. [00:00:47]And beyond that, to the point today where they are doing some well, again, shady things I mentioned in the intro that I was concerned about what Amazon was doing with pat. They got a patent on this one-click purchase. Now I have been a fan of patents for a long time. I do not like the patent law as it exists today. [00:01:14] And in fact, I haven't liked it for quite some time, but this patent law where you do

Kaseya and the Problem with Managed Service Providers We have really in front of us, a critical warning. We're trying to figure out what should we do or to stop people from attacking us. That's a problem. What should we do? Many of us have gone out to managed services providers, and now they have let us down.  Did you hear about the Kaseya hack? It has had a huge impact on people. It's absolutely crazy. Or you heard about a thousand companies that got together and they have hired a negotiator in order to negotiate the ransom with the bad guys that have ransom there. It is huge. It's huge. But let's talk about why this happened, because I think there are many things that you and I have overlooked here over the years, this ransomware God guy, gang called REvil, R E V I L has targeted cause say, or customers through. [00:01:04] Say, but it isn't just kissy customers. It's really cause say, is customers for the most part. Now your head might be spinning a little bit, but here's, what's happening. I'm a business o

Predictions About Olympic Cyberattacks We're all excited about the upcoming Olympic games. And so are the hackers. Oh my goodness. I just finished reading a report by the cyber threat Alliance about what they're expecting to happen at these Olympic Games in Tokyo.  The Olympics have always been a huge target when it comes to the bad guys. [00:00:23] You might remember there have been abductions at the Olympics before where some of the Olympic competitors were held at gunpoint. Of course, we're not going to forget that one anytime soon. And looking back through the last few Olympics, there have been many different types of attacks, some more successful than others, frankly, but looking at this report, they were talking about the 2008 Beijing Olympic. [00:00:51] The attacks then were relatively limited. There were about a 12 million cyber alerts per day. Now this is part of the problem with cyber security. You get so many alerts. What do you do? How do you. Bond and none of those 12 million cyber alerts per day

Facebook Confirms Its Asking People to Report "Extremists" Reporting on your neighbors is something you would expect from a socialist government, right? A communist government, a fascist government, any form of socialist government. Now Facebook is doing exactly that and it's going to interfere with our lives. Facebook has now confirmed what it's calling a test of its "do-you-know" an extremist prompt and that's got me really rather worried. And it has a lot of other people worried as well. I was talking to a friend of mine who was also in the media biz, who was saying just over the last couple of weeks. He's received this a bunch of times. And I mentioned this to another friend of mine who is not in the media business. And he said that he got it as well. [00:00:48] And he said his was: are YOU an extremist? Which I think is interesting. First of all, extremist is not defined. And of course, with these people who are monitoring accounts on Facebook, announce where their definition of extremist is going to be.

2021-07-17 1122 Craig Peterson (2): Reporting on your neighbors is something you would expect from a socialist government, right? A communist government, a fascist government, any form of a socialist government. Now Facebook is doing exactly that, and it's going to interfere with our lives. [00:00:16] Facebook has now confirmed what it's calling a test of its "do-you-know" an extremist prompt, and that's got me really rather worried. [00:00:28] And it has a lot of other people worried as well. I was talking to a friend of mine who was also in the media biz, who was saying just over the last couple of weeks. He's received this a bunch of times. And I mentioned this to another friend of mine who is not in the media business. And he said that he got it as well. [00:00:48] And he said it was: are YOU an extremist? Which I think is interesting. First of all, an extremist is not defined. And of course, with these people who are monitoring accounts on Facebook, announce where their definition of extremist is going t

The New Anti-Robocall Technology is Coming Online I know everybody I talk to hates these robo calls. They're happening all of the time. What are we doing about it? The FCC has made some changes and they just went into place. So we're going to talk about STIR/SHAKEN, right? Of course the government has to come up with some really cute acronyms and that's what's turned, shaken are, but here is what's happened. We have the ability to over TCPI P send phone calls. In fact, in my phone, I have a phone that's hooked up to T-Mobile and it is using wifi. [00:00:38] So when I'm making a phone call, it is going over my wifi in the office or at my house or wherever. It doesn't even use the regular salad or network, unless it has to why? Because it's all TCP IP. And then on top of it, sometimes with LTE and now always with five G you are using TCP IP. So your voice is converted into a digital signal. [00:01:10] Right there on your phone. And it is handled as data, just like pretty much any other data would be handled. No

60% of Used Amazon Echos Can Be Compromised Don't Sell Used Google Home, Nest, Echos, etc.! The majority of Americans, at least those of middle income and higher, have the smart devices in their homes. It's everything from the Amazon echo all the way up through our thermostats. Are these a good idea? And what do we do when we get rid of them?  IoT, you might've seen that before. And it stands for the internet of things, and these devices are actually computers on them. Have even more than one computer. Some of them have a lot of processing power. You look at some of these speakers, like the apple; the big apple speaker has some amazing processing belt right into it. Of course, it also has a number of different ways that you can use it with Siri and everything else that's in it. But if you're going to sell these things, if you're going to sell your echo dot or other things, what should you be looking at? How can you do this? I had a listener who reached out to me. [00:00:56] This was only a couple of weeks ago

FBI Using a "Honeypot" for a Massive Sting Operation & Olympic Cybersecurity This time, the FBI didn't just set up a sting, they set up a honeypot. And I talked about it with Mr. Matt Gagnon coming right up. Along with a couple of other major points this week, including what has been happening with the Olympics and cybersecurity. So here we go. [00:00:22] Matt Gagnon: Craig. Let's get into some of these topics, if you can. I had an interesting conversation yesterday with some folks about tech policy what's been going on censorship, et cetera. It's obviously a pretty common topic when you talk to especially conservative minded folk they're pretty upset about what's going on there there. And one of the, one of the people I was talking to who said to me that that's, somebody must have dimed them out that they had a Facebook post that was blocked because Facebook. [00:00:48] Was maybe notified that they did something and it was pulled down here that does that brings to mind this story about the, do you know a

Facebook's Extremist Prompt Leads To... What to Do About Ransomware? We got hacked again as a country and what's being done about it. What's the Biden administration doing? They sent us special Envoy over to Russia. Yeah, Senator former Senator John Kerry. But what's he talking about? The climate deal. This is hurting us badly here in the United States. It's hurting at least a third of our businesses every year. Just this year alone. Ransomware payments have gone up threefold. It is incredible. What's happening and he's doing nothing about it. And then we, so we've got to talk about this Facebook protest prompt that they've come up with now. Hey, do you know someone. Might be an extremist or it might be, become an extremist. Do you realize what's going to happen? If everybody's starts to reporting on everybody else? We already know that we've got these trolls out there that report people, that report posts just because they don't like the person. Now, what are we going to do? Start FBI investigations. Every t

What Does the "Billionaire" Space Race Mean to You? We have Sir Richard Branson up in space.  The race of the billionaires, Jeff Bezos, of course being another one. What does this mean to us? Does this mean that space is solely for the rich? Is it going to help our businesses, our economy, what's behind all of this, and where are we going? That's exactly what I discussed this morning with Mr. Christopher Ryan. Let's find out how it's going to affect you and me. [00:00:29] Chris Ryan: Yeah, Richard Branson is in the news day, Sir Richard Branson to you, Craig, as he reached the outer space and was able to bring individuals up there and do in your view, is this going to be a thing where commercial space travel is going to be something that we see and have access to. No average Americans. [00:00:52] To me, I feel like it's taken decades for even this type of space flight to take place. And I feel we are still so far away from an average Joe, like you, or I will be able to afford to go into. The areas almost to o

Being Green Now Includes New Nuclear Plants - It's The Only Solution Whether or not, you believe there is a climate crisis or this man caused the only thing that's been constant here on earth has been change. And particularly the weather it's been much hotter and much colder than it is right now. I do believe that we have climate crises from time to time. [00:00:24]We know that there were cavemen and women living during the ice age. And I think they might call that a crisis. We've also had times where people. We're going and having a great life, the garden of Eden, you might think where the carbon dioxide levels were much higher than they are today. And that means the plants were greener. [00:00:49] They grew more verdun to everything else. Okay. So there is a whole lot of change and it's been going on for. Now the statistics I've seen that make a lot of sense to me, show that there is warming going on. Now that doesn't mean that we're not going to about to drop into an ice age or mini ice age. Heck we had on

We've talked about a lot of the cybersecurity problems. I'm going to talk now about what Microsoft is doing with Windows 11, a lot of hardware out there right now, anyways, will not run windows 11. So what is Microsoft doing to solve this problem? Microsoft has been blamed for many of the problems we've had with computers and computer security for a long time. And between us, they're doing these things that caused security problems because of us, because of the users of windows. Microsoft seems to continually try and support the older software and older hardware till very recently, you could still run windows XP 95, 98 programs on your windows machine, on your new windows. [00:01:05] Back then Microsoft. I had shoe horned in the internet protocols and tried to, make it secure. They ended up buying. I'm trying to remember now, cause I worked on this code. Way back when I think it was the spider implementation of TCPI P out of Ireland, that Microsoft ended up using as a base. [00:01:25] And I fixed quite a few

You might've heard me talk about this already, or you heard about it elsewhere. This US technology firm is called Kaseya. They're headquartered in Miami and they are used by businesses and governments around the world. And they're spreading ransom. A week ago on Friday, a flood of ransomware hit hundreds of companies around the world. [00:00:25] We're thinking now it may have been thousands. We don't have good numbers yet, but we're talking about grocery stores, public broadcasting schools, national railway system. They were all here. With ransomware. Now this is the modern ransomware, we think which encrypts your files, but also poles your data. So that later on, it can extort money from you. [00:00:55] Okay. Very bad stuff. It really caused disruption in Sweden. They was incredible and forced hundreds of businesses to close. Now, every one of these victims had something in common. They had network management and remote controls, software developed by casinos. Now cause say it is used by, I think their their

Hey, do you trust that all of the information you share with the IRS is being kept safe? As a general rule, it probably has been, but what we're finding right now is maybe it hasn't, maybe there's been a leak.  There is a lot to talk about when we're talking about the IRS. [00:00:19] They of course have all of the information that they can get their hands on. They're already overloaded and we've got the Biden administration now looking for even more data to go to the IRS. You probably already know that if you do a transaction at a bank above $10,000, that it gets reported to the IRS and probably the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and any other three-letter agency that you can think of course, that doesn't include the BATF. [00:00:52] Because they're not a three-letter agency as much as they want to meet, but the IRS has records on everything, already that they know what your social security number is, what your name is, what your address is. They also have information about. The business you work for or businesses yo

[As heard on WGAN 2021-07-07] Good morning, everybody. We've got this massive attack underway. It's hitting businesses, and they're using supply chain attacks just like they did with Solar Winds. However, this one might actually be a little more fatal. A lot of businesses out there. So we talked about that this morning—this Kaseya hack. [00:00:21] We also talked about selling your smart device. Is it a good thing? I got a report from a listener about a whole bunch of Amazon orders that they had not made. So I'll tell you a little bit about that. And also, IRS looks like there might've been a data breach of what's going on. And frankly, what is the Biden administration proposing? [00:00:47] That's going to make things way worse when it comes to data breaches at the I R S in the future. So here we go with Mr. Matt Gagnon. [00:00:57] Matt Gagnon: And we're back 7:36 WGAN morning news. A pleasure to have you on this fine Wednesday morning. Thanks for listening. Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us every Wednesd

[As heard on WTAG, WHJJ, WHYN on 2021-07-06] Good morning, everybody. This morning, I got to talk about this IRS data breach. We're supposed to trust them what happened here. We're actually not quite sure. And apparently, neither does the IRS. We also got into a climate battle. Should we be doing something more with nuclear power? So we got into that in some detail as well. [00:00:24] So here we go. [00:00:25] Pat Desmarais: [00:00:25] Craig Peterson joins us. Craig is the Jim Polito show tech expert and has some great stories to talk about Craig. Good morning. [00:00:34] Craig Peterson: [00:00:34] Hey, good morning Pat. [00:00:36] Pat Desmarais: [00:00:36] Sorry, we can't meet in person, my friend, but it is what it is. The phone will have to do. Hey, you got some great stuff for us to go back and forth about one of these stories I have now. [00:00:47] Part of, and it has to do with our tax system and sensitive information that you and I give these people, the IRS, and you're referencing a story that publish