Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity: What Can Be done About Russia? What Can You Do? (2024)

Mar 12, 2022

What CanBe done About Russia?
What Can YouDo?

There is a whole bunch going on when it comes to Russia, ofcourse, the invasion of Ukraine. Why are people calling to have dotRU deleted?

This is really a big deal. And if you're watching from home, I'mgoing to go full screen on this article.

[Automated transcript follows.]

[00:00:23] This is an article from ARS Technica, and I've beentalking about it all week, which is that I can won't revoke Russianin Jeanette domains, says the effect. Devastating. This is franklypretty darn fascinating to me because I can, as this internationalorganization, it was put together in order to help make theinternet international.

[00:00:49] And I'm not talking about the data international, butcontrol of it. A lot of countries work. Because of course theinternet was created in nodded states. It was created by us taxpayers, money for the DOD. And it was designed to be veryresilient, in fact, so resilient that there could be a nuclearblast and that nuclear blast and.

[00:01:13] Causing problems, but yeah. Yeah, the internet isstill going to work. And the whole idea behind it was you couldhave multiple routers. They're all talking to each other nowadays.They're talking BGP four and they can say, how can I get from here?To there. And so the idea behind BGP is they all share thisinformation once the least cost way.

[00:01:36] What's the easiest way to post way. If you will, forme to get from point a to point B and it changes all the time. Soyou might be on a phone conversation. You might be listening to meright now, online streaming or watching the video you might bedoing, who knows what out there with digital communications.

[00:01:57] But the communications channel that you think you'reusing, where the data is going from, let's say my microphone,ultimately to your device, your ears, that data path, once itbecomes dated. Can be changing multiple times a second. Now itactually changes quite a bit. Initially as these internet backbonerouters, send the least cost, routing information back and forthto, and fro a very good thing, frankly, because it helps to speedeverything up.

[00:02:28] And there's other tricks that we're using you.Might've seen. For instance, Akamai and some of the URLs beforehave sites that you've gone to, and that's called a contentdelivery network and that helps get the content to be closer toyou. So if you're on a website in California and you're in NewHampshire, that website video, that website graphic, et cetera, isgoing to be coming from a server local to me here in NewHampshire.

[00:02:59] All right. That's how that all is supposed to work.So we have names you guys know about that internet, domain namesand those domain names. You already know those are turned intointernet addresses, and those addresses are then used by therouters to figure out where to go, how to get the data. The problemthat we're having right now, of course, is Russia seems to besubstantially abusing the intranet Putin, put a kill switch on tothe Russian internet sometime ago.

[00:03:31] And the idea behind the skills, which was, Hey,listen, if we don't want the world to be talking to us, we'll justcut it. Now he's tested it a couple of times, but what he has notdone is shut it down and he hasn't shut it down. As part of thisUkraine, more, what they did is they passed laws saying, Hey, ifyou publish something that disagrees with what we're saying, youget 15 years.

[00:03:59] And even these people who've been protesting on thestreets, they're getting a bound 60 days, 30 to 60 days in jail,just for protesting what's going on. So a lot of people have beensaying why don't we just, we turn off the Russian internet nowwe're not going to use Putin's kill switch in order to shut it alloff.

[00:04:19] We're not going to do a well, a few things. Shedecided not to do, denial of service attacks, et cetera. Althoughthere are hackers doing that and we are going to talk about thattoday, but they're saying what? Let's just go ahead and let's killtheir dot R E. The country domain. And I can, the guy who heads itup said, Hey, listen our mission is just to make sure that theinternet works.

[00:04:46] So shutting off the dot R U domain so that no one cango ahead and. We send right. A request out to the domain nameservers and get a resolution to an IP address. So if you try and goto Kremlin dot REU or something, you will get blocked and you willget blocked. Not blocked. No, I like the great firewall of China orof Russia.

[00:05:10] Now they've got one going pretty good. Yeah. Thankyou. You ain't using us technology. It's crazy. What we've got. Butwhat it does is it says, oh, I hide dot, are you, I don't know.What are you talking about? So there have been a lot of people whohave been pushing for it. And you'll see on my screen here that youcranes requested to cut Russia off from some of these core parts ofthe internet.

[00:05:35] And I can, which is the internet corporation forassigned names and numbers. I couldn't remember what that wasearlier said that I can must remain neutral and their mission theysay is not to take punitive actions. It's to make sure the internetworks. So are they really taking punitive actions of the cat Russiaoff?

[00:05:56] It's really interesting to me because look at whathas been going on. You've got companies like Facebook as the greatexample who has gone ahead and just shut off people. They didn'tlike what they were saying. My goodness. At one point of you saidyou should wear a mask during this pandemic.

[00:06:15] You would be cut off from Facebook. And then ofcourse, if you said, no, you don't, you shouldn't don't need you,you shouldn't wear a mask that at that point you would be cut off,because science right. Sciences, we know exactly what we're doingnow. It goes on and on. If you said that it came from a lab inChina, you would have your account suspended.

[00:06:35] Now of course their whole tune has changed and yeahprobably came from a lab in China. It's crazy what these peoplehave been doing. So we have arbiters of truth, who are somecontractors sitting in their home or wherever it is the contractorsfor Facebook that are going through posts that people are flaggingas Incorrect as fake news.

[00:07:02] So what happens is people say fake news and then thatgoes off to their team that then looks at it and says okay. Yeah,fake news because we disagree with it. It just blows my mind. Wehave to have free and fair and open discussions. Don't we. You havethat line at Facebook and Google does some of the same.

[00:07:22] A lot of these sites do a lot of the same. You getour major media outlets that are all deciding what they want toreport on and what they want to label as fake and fake news. I'mjust shaking my head because it's hard. It's hard to believe. Whatabout. Russia is putting out fake news, as I've said many timesbefore the E the first casualty in war, this isn't my quote. Thefirst casualty in war is what, it's the truth. So if truth is thefirst casualty, then that means we've got a lot of propaganda goingon. We had propaganda coming out of Ukraine. We've caught some ofthose, like the, what was it? The. Chat goes, fighter, pilot,whatever it was who had killed, what was it?

[00:08:12] Five Soviet or Russian jets, Soviet era using silverdeer, techno era technology on the part of the Ukrainians turns outwell. Okay, that, that was false news. That was fake news. Thewhole thing about snake island, where you had that Russianmilitary. I know what it was a frigging but anyways boat sittingthere saying we are a Russia.

[00:08:33] Warship, you will surrender or, whatever. Do youremember that snake on just the small place, 13 guys and supposedlythey shelled it and they killed all 13 turns out that was probablyfake news as well. So that's from the Ukrainian side and on theRussian side they hardly reported I as to how many.

[00:08:57] The we're in fact, initially for quite a while, theywere saying there are no desks. Then at the same time, theUkrainians are saying they're 2,500 Russians dead. And that numberkeeps going up, who knows what it is today. It gets really crazy inthe time of war. So if Facebook is going to stop someone fromsaying don't wear masks or do wear masks, depending on what day ofthe week it is basically right.

[00:09:20] Wednesday. It's okay to say that Thursday is not okayto say that we're back. No it's not. Or then why can't that type ofcensorship? Move on to the next. I that's a big question I havenow. Should we be shutting it off? I'll pull this back up on thescreen again. And it, this article from ARS, Technica is sayingthat experts have warned, whoever they are that shutting down thedot R U domain.

[00:09:53] Is going to cause just incredible problems forRussians, which man would it ever talking about a major blow to theeconomy. And it would also cause problems for people who are tryingto find out more truth about. Russia cause you couldn't get totheir site. Now we've seen some amazing things in Russia.

[00:10:15] We had the Russian, one of the Russian news agenciesare T which is broadcasting and here in the U S that their entirestaff just walked out saying, forget about it. We're not going topromote this fake news, but this is a little to do trip question mepersonally. I don't think anybody should be censoring any.

[00:10:38] For almost anything. Yo, there are some limits, butthey're pretty extreme in my book. I'd rather know someone is anidiot because they're allowed to say stupid things, and counter,counter it, counter their arguments. You've got to havediscussions

[00:10:54] Microsoft. Yeah, they've been around a long time.They've been helping us. They've had lots of cybersecurityproblems. People use Microsoft software on their desktop. Somepeople use it for servers, which is crazy, but listen to whatthey're doing now.

[00:11:10] This is a little concerning. I'm going to pull thisarticle up on the screen.

[00:11:15] For those of you who are watching a long, either onrumble or YouTube ARS, Technica article, they have some reallygreat articles. This particular one is about our friends atMicrosoft. This is cool. Microsoft announced today? This was like aweek or so ago that Microsoft would be suspending all new sales ofMicrosoft products and services in Russia.

[00:11:45] Following the countries, unjustified, unprovoked, andunlawful invasion of. Now Microsoft didn't give any specifics aboutthe products, but it really is likely to be a blanket ban of all ofthe Microsoft products. This is very cool because Microsoft hastaken an approach I've never seen them do before, which isokay.

[00:12:10] When. Gets hacked. You get our friends at apple,putting together patches and getting them out. They get them uppretty quick. Microsoft had been doing much the same. The problemwas some months there were patches every day that you had to apply.That's how bad this software is. And they decided that man, let'sbe like politicians here.

[00:12:34] Let's release some very damning news Friday. At about4:30 PM before a long weekend. So no one will notice. Yeah. Y'allare friends of politicians do that all the time. What Microsoftdecided they do is, Hey, wait a minute. We're going to havepatches. It's not going to slow down. And because our code isterrible.

[00:12:56] So what we're going to do, let me see here. How aboutwe just release all of them at once and we'll just call it patchTuesday, right? Because people were complaining about how much workit was, how much effort was effort. It was to try. They hate them.These machines apply these patches every day. Huge problem foreverybody from home users to big companies out there.

[00:13:21] So Microsoft has said, okay let's do that. Let'sburry it. So nobody will notice okay that's what Microsoft does.And now we've gotten used to that. Now we have. We remember twoguys, right? Bill gates followed by Steve Ballmer. Steve Ballmerwas a nut job. Bill gates was a bad man.

[00:13:40] I think he's just been trying extra hard tocompensate for all of the evil he did over the years. But whatwe're looking at now is new management and that he's been in therenow for a few years, doing a great job, cleaning up Microsoft,making it a very competitive company. He has done some amazingthings.

[00:14:02] One of the things that he has decided to do, that'sbeen very effective is how about this? How about we go ahead. Andwe work with various governments to help stop these Russianhackers. And I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, what washappening and the Microsoft had reached out to the white house andsaid, Hey, listen.

[00:14:27] What we have been looking at the hacks that have beencoming from the Russian hackers, and we've been preparing fixes forsome of those hacks. How about we work directly with some of theseother countries? This reminds me a whole lot of the lend leaseprogram in world war two. You might remember this thing, but the usof course, initially was not involved in the war and they decided,okay we've got to help the United Kingdom.

[00:15:00] How are we going to help them? The UK doesn't havethe money to buy ships, to have us make weapons, bullets know. Whatthey did is they had people donate the rifles, the guns, AML fromhome. Plus they made them the government, instead of selling themto the UK, they lent them to the UK because the UK could not affordeverything that it needed in order to fight a war against thenational socialist in Germany.

[00:15:28] So what did they do? We just shipped the stuff overthere and called it a lend slash lease. I think that's a greatidea. And what Microsoft is doing is also great idea. They havebeen decoding, reverse compiling, if you will, and interpreting thecode, looking at what some of the ransomware and other maliciouscode the Russia has been using against Ukraine, and they have beenproviding.

[00:15:57] All kinds of insight information to these othercountries. Now, this is a great idea for a few reasons, one of thereasons, and I think maybe the biggest reason is that theransomware, the viruses, all of this malware that they're producingis. Not particularly discriminating. Do you guys remember maybe Idunno, what was it?

[00:16:22] Six months ago, I taught, told you how to avoidgetting most of this Russian ransomware. And it was as easy as justinstalling. Yeah, installing a keyboard on your computer windows orMac, windows. Those are the machines are always getting attackedquite successfully most of the time, but the windows keyboard.

[00:16:49] Russian language. Now you didn't even have to use it.You don't have to have a keyboard, right? This isn't a Russiankeyboard that I'm holding up here on camera. This is just a regularus keyboard. You can just install a virtual, Russian keyboard. Andonce that keyboard was installed, you're pretty safe.

[00:17:06] Why? Because Vladimir poop. Dictator for life ofRussia decided he would just go ahead and stop anybody that wastrying to hack Russian. Companies businesses, government agenciesand what's the best way for the hackers to do that. Cause theydidn't want to end up in Siberia for the rest of their livesbecause of a hack.

[00:17:29] Now they went ahead and said, okay if there's aRussian Cyrillic keyboard on the machine, we're not going toactivate. So if the software, the malware on your computer, all youneed to do is have a Russian keyboard. Yeah, that's it prettysimple. I told you that months ago, now what we're seeing is theseindiscriminant types of software that are being used inUkraine.

[00:17:57] Why doesn't the keyboard trick work while some ofUkrainians peak Russian, we could go in. To the background on thatof the massacre, the starvation purposeful starvation of Ukrainiansby the Soviet union over many years ago. And how they then gavetheir property, their homes to Russians to move into in order tooccupy Ukraine.

[00:18:23] So there's people in Ukraine who are Russian speakingof course. Now we're talking two or three generations, four, maybedown the road from when the Soviet union killed all of thosemillions of people. But there are some fights that to say, there'sRussians, Russian speaking people there. Let me put it thatway.

[00:18:41] Perfect. In Southeastern Ukraine anyways I'm going onand on I, this is not an education on war or history. This we'retalking about cyber security. So the, they have, they been,Microsoft found many cases of Russians putting destructive. Anddisruptive or even more than that data wiping malware ontocomputers, it spreads indiscriminately.

[00:19:13] So Microsoft looking at what's happening, you crane,trying to get patches together for all of us, letting othercountries know about what's going on is going to be. Amazingbecause this malware, which is wiping computers, primarily, it'snot really just straight up ransomware give us money and we'll giveyou your data back.

[00:19:35] This is just showing your data, that malware is goingto leak outside of Ukraine. Yeah. Cause us all kinds of booktension, probably. When we get back, I want to talk about thishere. This is our friend Ilan Musk, and we've been following alongwith some of the stuff been going on with his new satellite systemin Ukraine.

[00:19:58] The whole concept of these satellites and circlingthe earth, providing us with internet, just regular guides. It'sgoing to be in our smartphones is changing everything. We're goingto talk about Elon Musk and what's happened over in Ukraine.

[00:20:15] Our friend Elon Musk has done a lot of things overthe years. He has really helped us for frankly, the Tesla andwhat's been happening there.

[00:20:26] Space sex, his main concern being let's get. Off of asingle planet on to multiple planets, right? The movement to Mars,NASA's working on a serious moon base. I reminded him of space1999. You guys remember that show, but yeah, we're going to have amoon base by then and it makes a lot of sense. So who's going to goto these well, there's some interesting lotteries people have toapply and everything else, but he's done so much, right?

[00:21:00] He's got the boring company you'd already know aboutTesla and boring company in case you didn't know makes undergroundtunnels. He has also. A few other things has got a huge batterymanufacturing facility. They're working on new battery technologiesto make all of our lives a little bit better, particularly if wehave an electric house or electric car, because this is what goodis it to have electricity that you can't use.

[00:21:25] And that's really what they're trying to do is makeit so that electricity is available 24 7 for you. And. Those spaceX, which is what I mentioned as well as what we're going to talkabout right now. I'm going to pull this up on my screen. For thoseof you who are watching over on rumble, or of course, YouTube, thisis fascinating.

[00:21:49] He said there's a high probability of Russian attackson Starlink in Ukraine. Now that is fascinating because what he'sdone is he has sent over truckloads. I'm showing a picture of atruck. In fact, with these Starling terminals in it, that's fromARS Technica. Just double-checking it here, but this is verycool.

[00:22:12] This is posted by the vice prime minister over therein Ukraine. And they are talking about these terminals. Now aterminal in this case is something that allows your devices to talkto the Starlink satellites, or there's going to be a hugeconstellation. They've got 2000 satellites up and they're puttinganother 12,000.

[00:22:38] These types of satellites are much different thanwhat we've been used to over the years. We typically we've hadthese massive things sitting up in space. I worked with RCA Astrospace many years ago and I saw. They're testing facilities, whichare just incredible. They had this huge vacuum chamber that theybrought me in to see as we were working on space shuttlesoftware.

[00:23:05] Yeah. I wrote software that they used to put thespace shuttle together yeah. Way back in the day. So that was apretty proud moment. Anyways. It's we're not talking about thesehuge satellites, like they used to launch, we're talking about verysmall cell. And they're not just sitting way, way up there.

[00:23:26] These are in basically in low orbit around the earthand they're geostationary. In other words, they stay in one spot. Ibelieve this is the way they've got these things set up. So thesesatellites then allow because they're so close to the earth, allowthem to use less power. And also the other advantage to thatis.

[00:23:49] The delay, right? The delay between having to send itall the way up and back down, because electricity takes time,right? Yeah. Travels at the speed of light. But nowadays youmight've noticed it can take your quarter second, half a second.When you're talking to someone, when I'm on the radio with some ofthese radio stations or the delay can be absolutely incredible.

[00:24:11] Like I half second to a second sometimes. And that'sjust because they're being cheap. This type of technology where youhave these constellations and it isn't just Elon Musk. It isn'tjust Starling, but constellations with will ultimately we'll havetens of thousands of satellites up there. Not, there's all kinds ofother potential problems not getting into that right now.

[00:24:34] But what it does mean is. Can communicate and we'venever had this sort of thing before we had the us military, theNavy in fact, put together a communication system that lives on topof the internet and called nowadays. Generically the dark web. Andit was set up to allow our military, our state department to beable to communicate with people in countries that are back in theday under Soviet control, all kinds of potential problems.

[00:25:10] So whenever those problems existed, they just wentahead and used this onion network, which is a part of the dark web,et cetera, et cetera. So let's say we had before. Now what happensif you're a country like Ukraine, where 100% of your internet comesfrom Russia, Russia obviously can sit there and listen in.

[00:25:32] Hopefully your encryptions. Good. A lot of Russianshave been using telegram and already get real news about what'shappening in their country and other places. And Della Graham isnot that secure, frankly. WhatsApp pretty secure signal is the oneyou want to pay close. Attention to signal is considered to be themost secure of all of these secure communications apps.

[00:25:57] But there's a level above all of that, because ifthey can tell that you're communicating, even that is enough togive them some information. So they might not know what was in thattransmission, but if the transmission is all of a sudden, a tons ofactivity coming over, lots of data, lots of messages going back andforth, they can say maybe there's something about to happen.

[00:26:21] That came out. You might remember the old orange bookfor security way back in the eighties, I think is when it came out.But part of what you had to do was cover up your. Actual realcommunication. So it's one thing to have the communicationsencrypted, but you wanted to always have about the same amount ofcommunications going back and forth.

[00:26:42] So people couldn't figure out what you're doing nowwith these types of devices. That kind of problem still exists. Andthis is part of what Elon Musk is warning about here. Pull it up onmy screen again, for those people who are watching Elon Musk isurging users of his satellite system to put their Starlink antennasas far as.

[00:27:08] From people as possible. Now, why would he be doingthat? Because frankly, that terminal is transmitting to thesatellite as well as receiving from the satellite. And it isentirely possible that there could be some evil software that islistening in for the satellite transmissions and sends a littlemissile your way.

[00:27:36] Also, of course the Russians have satellites in spacethat can look down on the ground. Now it's something as small as aterminal four Starlink, little hard to see, but Elon Musk issaying, Hey, listen guys, go ahead and camouflage it. You mightwant to spray paint. It just don't use metallic paint so that theycan't see it and place it as far away from where people are aspost.

[00:27:59] So you can still use it and only use it when you needto use it. Don't keep it up and running all the time. But this isthe start of something great. Something where you can't easilyblock people's communication. So Russia has tried to do. And theyhave been jamming the Starlink satellites. So what did must do?

[00:28:23] He delivered all of his engineers to working on howcan we get around the Russian Jack? And according to Elon Musk,they have gotten around it and they now have their satellitesystems completely jammed free from the Russians. I think that'sfascinating. They're probably using some good spread spectrumtechnology that was actually known about it and world war II.

[00:28:47] And then we can talk about that for a long time.Heady, you might remember her anyways, skip that for now. Stick herout. We got more when we. A whole bunch of pandemonium out therebecause of what Russia's been doing in Ukraine and how it's flowingover to us as well. Hey, this is not great news.

[00:29:15] Pandemonium is the name of the game over there inRussia. And they are being very successful. We're going to talkabout what happened in Bella ruse. We'll talk a little bit aboutwhat happened in Ukraine with cybersecurity and what's happeningright here right now.

[00:29:36] Complete ARS Technica today. They've got some greatarticles this week, looking into the Russians. What are they doing?What kind of problems is that causing us? But we are seeing someinteresting attacks back on. And back in very big way. Russia hasbeen going after you crane in the cyberspace for a long time, wespoke a few years ago about what Russia had been doing with the taxsoftware for Ukraine.

[00:30:12] We don't do this in the U.S. Or in Canada, but mynumber of European countries do you, where you have to have. Theold official tax preparation software put together by thegovernment for your business or for your person, depending on thecountry you're living in France is a great example of this. AndUkraine is another one.

[00:30:36] So Ukraine says, Hey guys, you got to go ahead anduse our software. That means every business in Ukraine is usingtheir software. To manage their tax payments and their accounts,frankly. And that wonderful little piece of software was hijackedby our friends in Russia. So they grabbed a hold of it. Theyin.

[00:31:02] Did some code into it that added rent somewhere tothe software. So now all of the businesses in Ukraine are prettymuch guaranteed to be using this hacked software. We have a clientwho has offices over in France, and we found a really interestingproblem with them because. The French software that was being usedfor taxes for French businesses had an extra little problem.

[00:31:33] And that extra problem was, it was insecure as can bewhoever wrote this, must've taken a Microsoft programming courseand had no idea DIA about the consequences of what they were. So itwas very insecure. The, it was using a version of SSL, which is anencryption that's based on another type of increase.

[00:31:57] I don't want to get too wonky here, but that was justone of its many problems and bad keys, et cetera, et cetera. Andkeys by the way, was using keys that have been revoked, which youshould never do. Bottom line. Oh my gosh. Hey, if you want moreinformation on this, just drop me a note.

[00:32:16]me@craigpetersohndotcomandyoucanalsogetmynewsletterwithallkindsofgreatlittletipsmeatcraigpeterson.com.Just let me know. So in this case, we had to help that company inFrance. Ignore the security restrictions that were on their systemsso they could use the French tax system. So anyways, I told youthat, so I could tell you that the same thing happened toUkraine.

[00:32:45] In a different way, their software was pre infected.So when they downloaded it, ta-da. They got that piece ofransomware that virus had spread. It was just a nightmare. And ofcourse it robbed. If you will, Ukraine, government of funds, thatwould have been. So we had now a bit of a shift. I'm going to pullthis up on the screen again, this article, because what this shifthas shown is that the hackers are now operating on the side ofyou.

[00:33:21] Crazy. Which is just fascinating. So the group calledanonymous, you might be familiar with them. Of course, they've beendoing a lot of hacking for a lot of years, releasing privateinformation, government and information, all that sort of stuff.And they have a mast what they're calling a volunteer.

[00:33:44] It. And this it army has been going and doing whatwell hacking Russian sites apparently. So this article is justabsolutely fascinating and they pulled some of from wired as well,but the Russian space research Institute, their website was hacked,leaked files that were stolen from the Russian space agency, madeit all the way on to the.

[00:34:13] The space agency was hacked in their website said,leave Ukraine alone, Alto anonymous. Will you up even more? Theyalso did. What's called a D O S. Which is a distributed denial ofservice attack. Those can be very difficult to protect againstunless you're set up in advance to help protect yourself.

[00:34:39] And that pretty much destroyed Russia's dot are youtop level domain? So we've talked about how domain services work,right? So Doug are, you is like.com except dot R U is for running.And so the domain name servers that handled our, you were knockedoff the air because no one could really get to them.

[00:35:02] They used amplifying attacks and stuff withoutgetting into all of the details. So basically they were trying tocut off access and they did for a lot of people to any. That endedin, are you? It's great. These are just some of the latest in thissurge of hacktivism. That's been going on one of the ones Imentioned a couple of weeks ago with the Belarusians deciding theywere going to hack the Belarus railroad, which was being used.

[00:35:31] To bring Russian troops, supplies, tanks, et cetera,all on rail, right on down right to the border of Ukraine. So thatwas hacked so that they couldn't use it in order to go after. Ofcourse Russia was able to get to Ukraine, but there's also beenprotests around the world. 48 Russian cities raise millions ofdollars through cryptocurrency donations.

[00:36:01] Now, I'm not a big cryptocurrency guy and I'm not abig crypto currency guy because while. Cryptocurrency is likely tobe outlawed by most, if not all governments. And they certainlycould shut it down and it is not anonymous. All right. So usingcryptocurrency does not mean it does not equate to completelyanonymous.

[00:36:28] They have done a lot of donations. They're bigcompanies including, we just talked earlier about Microsoft, butalso apple shell, BP, a McDonald's Starbucks. And these hacktivistshave really joined in. And w we talked about a couple of otherthings, so this is messy. Because even more than in peace time,these active combat that are really hacking happening right now,rendering, hacktivism, any effectual and largely just distractingbecause we are now in a hot war right now.

[00:37:10] Maybe we don't have our. Eric planes bombing Russianmovements or other things, but there is a kinetic war going on overthere. There are bullets, et cetera, mean exchanged. So thehacktivist efforts have been, visible. There's no question aboutthat. But what have they done? See, that's an advantage to being acountry like Russia, or like the Ukraine, or excuse me, Ukraine,because both of those countries there, their industrial base, themilitary industrial base is not heavily automated unlike ours.

[00:37:50] What could you do? What can you shut down? So whatyou shut down the Russian space agency's website, how far did youget into it? Probably not very far. We also have a couple of groupsand we talked about these guys many times the Conti group, whichhas been.

[00:38:07] Terrible and hurting us businesses, individuals,government agencies, and stuff, the Cuming project, both of themhave declared their allegiance to Russia. You might remember a fewweeks ago, we talked here about how we have had some researcherstrack down most of these Russian hacker groups and their money.

[00:38:30] And they all ended up in one building in Moscow. No,that should tell you something, right? In fact, the most expensivereal estate right there in downtown Los gal, the tallest building,et cetera. So these groups getting together in order to protect thefather land there in Russia. Ah interesting problem.

[00:38:52] How much of this is really controlled by the Kremlin?It's a very good question. Context. Was dismantling itsinfrastructure. It, some of their top people were arrested byPutins military. Not military, but police state over there. Andthat was interesting too. That was again before the invasion, butwhy would Putin be shutting them down at all?

[00:39:20] Apparently they said some things. That they shouldn'thave said. So now they've come out and have decided they're goingto support Russia in its entirety. Now we mentioned Microsoft andhow Microsoft has decided they are going to protect othercountries. As well as you crane, at least as far as the Russianmalware goes, and they've been very active in that.

[00:39:46] And there are a number of cybersecurity companies andother organizations that have released free versions of some oftheir software, these digital defense tools. Free offerings. Ourbig cranes defend the networks. Google says it's human rights focusde dos protection service project shield is now in use by more than150 Ukrainian websites.

[00:40:12] So it's very good. Bottom line propped up by the way,published this massive trove of personal data. Allegedlyidentifying 120,000 Russian soldiers deploy. In Ukraine that wasUkrainian prov, not the old good old Russian Sophia Pramata man. Iremember I bought one of those on new standing Canada once.

[00:40:36] And I had a friend who was from Yugoslavia and hesaid, oh, can I show that to my wife? He showed it to his wife. Shetore it up. I said, I want my Pravda, Craig Peterson dot com.

[00:40:47] The tech world is all a buzz with this log for J orlog for shell. However you want to call it because we are lookingat what is probably the biggest security vulnerability the internethas had in a long time. I don't know how to express it anymore, butthere are multiple problems here. And even the patch that wasreleased to fix this problem was broken as being exploited in thelast 24 hours. There've been no less than 30 different new.Variations of the exploit. So what is going on? There is a computerlanguage that's used by many programmers, particularly in largerbusinesses called Java.

[00:41:37] You might remember this, I've been following it andusing it now, since it first came out very long time ago from sunMicrosystems. Java is a language that's designed to have kind of anintimate. CPU processor. So think about it. If you have an Intelchip that is an x86 type chip, what can you use instead of thatIntel chip to run that code?

[00:42:03] There are some compatible chips made mainly by AMDadvanced micro devices, but you're really rather limited. You haveproblems. Power. Guess what you're stuck. You're stuck in thatarchitecture. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you havesome of these devices that are designed by companies like apple,Google has their own.

[00:42:24] Now that our CPU's their graphics processing units aswell. And they completely replaced the Intel architecture. But theIntel code, the programs that are written for the Intelarchitecture that are compiled for Intel are not going to work onthe apple chips and vice versa. So what did apple do? Apple, forinstance, just moved from Intel over to.

[00:42:51] Own chipsets and these chips don't run Intel code. Sohow can you run your old apple apps? Apple has a little translator.They call Rosetta. It sits in the middle and it pretends it's anIntel processor. This really rather simple. And they've done anamazing job on this. And w Rosetta is actually a third partycompany and they helped apple as well with the transition from theIBM power series chips to the Intel chips.

[00:43:23] So how do you move the code around while you eitherhave. Recompile it, you may have to redesign it, rearchitect it forthe new type of processor and the new types of computers that aresupported by that processor. Or you may do what Apple's done here acouple of times now, and that is having an interpreter in themiddle that pretends it's something else pretends as an Intelchip.

[00:43:49] And then you can still run your in. Code because itknows, okay. It was designed originally for this apple Intelarchitecture. So I know how to make all of this work Java steps inand says why are you doing all of that? That's crazy. Isn't itmoving all of your code around all of the time. So Java's originalclaim to fame was what will make life easy for?

[00:44:14] What you do is you write your code. Using Java inJava is very similar to C plus in some of these other languagesthat are out there. And that language, when you're writing yoursource code will be compiled into an intermediate. Code. So whathappened is sun Microsystems designed this virtual machine?

[00:44:36] Now don't think of it like a normal VM, but we'retalking about a CPU architecture and CPU instructions. And so whatit did for those CPU instructions. Which is really quite clever, asI said we'll come up with what we think are the most useful. Andit's a Cisco architecture for those of you who are ultra geeks likemyself.

[00:44:59] And we will go ahead and implement that. And so thecompiler spits out code for this CPU that doesn't actually existanywhere in the known universe. And then what happened is sun wentout and said, okay we'll make an interpreter for. Artificial CPUthat'll run on Intel chips and we'll make another one that runs onthese chips, that chips and the other chips, beautiful concept,because basically you could write your code once debug it and runit off.

[00:45:32] Anything that was one of the original claims to famefor Unix, not so the run at anywhere part of it, but the part thatsays it doesn't take much work to move your code to differentmachine, and we're not going to get into Unix and its root I'vebeen around the whole time. It's crazy.

[00:45:51] I just finished reading a book and saying, I rememberthat. And they were going through all of the history of everythingI was in the middle of that. I did that. That was the first one todo this. It was fun. Anyhow, what Java has done now is it's reallysolidified itself in the larger enterprises.

[00:46:11] So basically any software that you might be using,like our website that is particularly with a larger business. Isgoing to be using Java and that Java language is using libraries.So in programmers, instead of doing what I used to do way back whenwhich is write in assembly code, or even in COBOL, and basicallyyou had to write everything, every part of every program, anythingyou wanted to have done, you had to write, or maybe you borrowedsomebody else's code and you embedded it in.

[00:46:45] And mind you, we only had 32 kilobytes of memory inthe mainframe back then the 360 30, for those of you who rememberthose things, but here is where things really changed. You now hadthe ability to take that code that you wrote and put it on a smart.You could take that exact same code, no recompiling or anything,and take that code and run it on a mainframe on our super computerin a car.

[00:47:15] So Java became very popular for that. Very reason inthese libraries that Java provided, made it even quicker to programand easier to program. Now there's some problems with languages.Java, which are these object oriented languages where you can, forinstance, say one plus one equals two. That will make sense.

[00:47:38] But what does it mean when you use a plus sign? Whenyou're talking about words? So you say apple plus oranges, what'sthat going to eat? That's called overloading an operator, and thisis not a course on programming languages, but what happens is aperson can write the library and says, oh if the programmer says anon-Apple plus an orange or string plus a string, what I want youto do is concatenate the strings.

[00:48:06] Now that programmer who wrote that has to figure outa couple of things, make some assumptions. Oh I should I put aspace between apple and. Or not. And what do they really mean?Okay. So this is how I'm going to interpret it. So that, it's avery simple example. But the concept is that now with theseoverloaded opera operations and these libraries that can go deepdeep, you now have the additional problem of people designing andwriting the libraries, making assumptions about what the programmerwants and what the programmer needs.

[00:48:43] Enter the problem with the log for J vulnerability.This is a very big deal because we're talking about a libraryfunction that is being used in Java by programmers. Now, you knowthat I have been warning everybody. Android for years, the biggestproblem with Android isn't its user interface. It isn't that it'smade by somebody else.

[00:49:10] The biggest problem. And of course, this is myopinion is that Android software is provided by Google and. It isgiven basically to any manufacturer that wants to license it. Andthen that manufacturer can't just take Google and run it. Have youever tried to install windows or Linux or free BSD?

[00:49:36] It's mainly a windows problem, frankly, but you go onahead and install that. And what do you need in windows? You'regoing to need driver. Oh wait a minute. This laptop is three yearsold. So how can I find them? And then you go around and you work onit and takes you a day and you finally find everything youneed.

[00:49:53] And you've got all of the drivers and now it works.But Microsoft provided you with the base operating system. Why doyou need drivers? You know the answer to that and it's becauseevery piece of equipment out there is different. Think about thisin the smartphone market. Think about it in the more general.

[00:50:10] Android market. There are thousands of these devicesthat are out there and those different devices are using differenthardware, which require different drivers. So when Google comes upwith a software patch, how well we just fix the log for J issuethat patch. Has to be given to the devices manufacturer who thenhas to talk to the manufacturers of the various components and makesure that the device drivers that they're using by the manufacturerare actually compatible.

[00:50:50] They're going to. Got the upgrades, wire it alltogether, and then test it on all of the different phones that theyhave and cars because the cars are running it. Now you see howcomplicated this get. And most Android devices will never. Getanother update. They will never get a security patch versusapple.

[00:51:14] Right now. They're still supporting the apple six Sthat came out in 2015. If I remember right, it's five or six yearsold. Now you don't find that in the Android space. You're lucky ifyou get two years worth of support, we're going to continue this.But this is this is really important. I'm going to talk more aboutthe actual problem.

[00:51:36] What is being done about it? What you can do about itas an individual, a home user, and as a business, in fact, keep aneye on your mailboxes. Cause I've got some more links to some sitesabout what you can do and how to do it and how to test for it.

[00:51:53] We're talking about what is likely to be the biggestset of hacks in internet history right now. It's absolutelyincredible what's going on. So we're going to talk about what itmeans to you and what's really going on. This whole problem isprobably bigger than anybody really realizes because Java, as Iexplained is a very common computer programming language.

[00:52:23] And it has a lot of features that bigger businesseslove. They love the ability to have multiple programmers working onsomething at the same time. They love the inheritance and multipleinheritance and all of these wonderful features of Java. One of thereally cool features is that you can, while your program isrunning, have the program change.

[00:52:48] It's. That's effectively what it's doing. It'spulling in libraries and functions in real time. And that's wherethis particular problem comes in. This has been a nightmare forJava forever. It's one of the reasons I have never migrated to Javafor any of the projects that I have. Don, it just gets to be anightmare.

[00:53:12] It reminds me of Adobe flash. It was the biggestsecurity problem that has ever been. And the number two Java andJava is running in the Android operating system. It is the core ofthe operating system. All of the programs are almost certainlywritten into. And now we're seeing Java up in the, not justentertainment systems in our cars, but in the actual computers thatare driving the cars, running the cars.

[00:53:45] And I get very concerned about this. We had two majoroutages just this week before this log for J thing came about overat Amazon. And those two Amazon outages knocked thousands ofbusinesses. Off the air out of business. You couldn't get to them.You remember the big problem with Facebook that we talked about alittle while back and in both cases, it looks like they were usingsome automatic distribution of software sent out the wrongstuff.

[00:54:15] And now you are effected. What happens? What happenswith the cars? If they push out a bad patch, how are we going toknow. What's that going to mean? And if your car has Java in it,are you going to be vulnerable to this? You wouldn't be vulnerableto log for J if your computer wasn't hooked up to anything, butnowadays the cars are hooked up to the net.

[00:54:39] We've had a couple of car dealers for our clients.Who've had the Mercedes we've had Acura Honda and others over theyears. And it's interesting going in there now and working withthem because they are doing massive downloads of firmware whenevera car comes in. So that car, if they don't have the right kind ofnetworks, that car can take hours to do.

[00:55:07] Dates. And I got to tell you, man, I'm just shockedby so many businesses, not willing to spend the money that itreally takes. So the poor technician is sitting there waiting forit to happen. We could make it happen in 15 minutes, but they'restuck there waiting for three or four hours sometimes for some ofthese downloads, no it's called cash them locally.

[00:55:26] These cars, some of them need new and differentfirmware. Some of them use the same and have. A reliable, fastinternet connection. And we've done that for many companies.Anyways, I'm going off on a bit of a tangent here. So forget thatlet's get back into this with Java. You can have a routine.

[00:55:48] Call another routine that was not even necessarilythought of by the programmer. Now, can you imagine that? So you'reprogramming and you're not considering adding something that'sgoing to send email out and yet you could have a log in. That'spart of the DNS and it gets logged that actually causes an email tobe sent or causes anything else to happen.

[00:56:17] That the exact problem we're seeing right now, it'sabsolutely crazy patterns in text fields, things like you can put auser desk agent. Which is normal for nature. UDP connection. Yousay, this is usually a guy who using Chrome version bar or Firefoxor safari, but you put the user agent field.

[00:56:40] And then after that, you've put in some, a little bitof code that tells Java, Hey, what I want you to do is this. Thisis a problem because we're finding now that I'm, again, I said thelast 24 hours, 30 different exploits over a million companies havebeen attacked on this. And we're talking about 10.

[00:57:05] Companies, absolutely hacked every minute right now.Can you think of, let's just think about that. And we're in themiddle of what, right? The big holiday season, we've had someholidays, there's people online, shopping there's businesses thatare trying to buy stuff, business stuff, almost every one of thosesites is likely to be compromised.

[00:57:31] It's that bad. It's absolutely nuts. What's happeninghere. This is a huge flaw. And by the way, it is flaw. Number thisyou ready for? This 44,228. In the year 2021. So the written 44,000flaws that have been discovered and reported, this is the CVEsystem for those of you who are interested, but this really is aworst case scenario.

[00:58:02] Because this log for J library is being pulled in toso many pieces of software out there on so many differentplatforms. The paths to to exploit this vulnerability are almostunlimited. And because there's so many dependencies on thisparticular log for J library, it's going to make it very difficultto patch without breaking other things.

[00:58:32] And the fact the exploit itself fits in. Tweet comeinjected almost anywhere. So it's going to be a very long weekendfor a lot of people, but let me tell you this. It is not going tobe solved in a few days, a week, a month. We're going to be seenthis. Years, because you have to be the person that wrote theprogram that has the source code to link in the new libraries,distributed out to your customers.

[00:59:03] Do you see what a nightmare? This is now? Some peopleare saying let's blame this on open source. This is an open sourceproduct. Yeah, it is an open source project and it turns out thateven though anyone can grab this, these, this library routine orany of these pieces of code, anybody can grab it.

[00:59:21] Anybody can look at it. It turns out it's one guy.Who actually maintained this, who has a budget of $2,000 a year tomaintain it. Nobody else pitched in. And all of these big companiesare all out there grabbing this code that this guy has been workingon and not paying much attention to it. Not donating to theproject.

[00:59:46] Which is saving them millions of dollars, not thatone project, but all of these projects collectively in the opensource community, it's it is more far reaching than this stretchvulnerability. You might remember this drug vulnerability that'swas, that was the root cause of the massive breach at Equifax thatExplo exposed all of our personal information.

[01:00:14] To the dark web. That's how bad this is. Oh my gosh.So Hey, if you want information, I've got a links, a bunch of linksset up here on what to do while you're waiting for the log for Jupdates from your vendors, how you can find on your servers. Ifthey have the log for J vulnerability, I've got a bunch ofinformation that I've stored up on that.

[01:00:41] And some others just email me. M e@craigpeterson.comasked for the list of the log for Jay's stuff or the Java's stuff.I'll figure it out. Be glad to send it to anyone that's interested.And if you need to scan to find out yourself and your business, letme know to me@craigpeterson.com.

[01:01:03] Wow. I was just going through a list published bySeesaw, this federal government agency that tracks some of thesetypes of vulnerabilities. And wow, this list is daunting of all ofthese pieces of software that are vulnerable to this huge hack.

[01:01:19] This is now a problem for each and every one ofus.

[01:01:23] I think I've established the man. This is nasty. Sowhat do you do? First of all, I sent out. Email a list of thingshave in fact, a few different lists of things that you can do. So Ihad one for consumers, one for businesses and a general thing aswell. And then a bunch of references.

[01:01:47] Of course there's even more references and more greatinformation now because I got that email. Pretty early. So I hopehopefully you had a chance to really look through that, but herelet's just talk a little bit about this, what to do thing youalready know because you guys really are the best and brightestthat you need to be careful when you're on.

[01:02:11] You cannot be online, Willy nilly, clicking onthings. And that includes emails and links. And this time of yearin fact, all year long, we're looking for. Wow, let's see. Is therea great bonus here? Look at they're having a sale, a discount. Ohno. I've only got three hours to respond or the deal's going to goaway.

[01:02:33] I've usually been of the sort that I just am, notthat influenced by some of these deals, but. I do sometimes want tofind out what it is. So I find myself this week clicking throughon. I'm on a lot of marketing lists because I like to follow whatdifferent marketers are doing, that's technology.

[01:02:55] And it's something I want to keep you guys informedabout. And I found myself just crazy amount of double checking tomake sure the link was valid. Now I'm sure you guys have, if you'reon my email list, you might notice that the from address is not theme at Craig Peterson. Calm email address. You can always send emailto me@craigpeterson.com and it ends up in my email box.

[01:03:21] And it might take me a few days, or even as much as aweek or two to get back to you. If it's something there's anemergency, you really need to fill out the form on my website, butI will get back with you. But the problem that some people havenoticed lately is. It doesn't say return address or sent fromme@craigpeterson.com.

[01:03:45] It's got this rather long convoluted convoluted URLthat has nothing to do with Craig peterson.com, sows a number ofpeople question it, it is a tracking. When can the idea is if I amgoing to be able to get back to people and if Karen is going to beable to nudge. I have to have these things tracked.

[01:04:09] So the email from address, when you hit reply, it isgoing to go to the, again, my email list server guys, and it isgoing to get tracked so I know. Okay. Okay. So now I've got a fewminutes or an hour. Let's sit down and go through a lot of theseemails so I can get back to people. That's a problem for manypeople, that's even more of a problem today than it ever has beenin the past.

[01:04:38] Now there's been a few sites that have done somethingabout tracking because many people don't like to be tracked. Myself included, although, as I've always explained on the show, it'sa double-edged sword because I would rather see commercials or adsfor a Ford F-150 pickup truck. When I'm looking to buy.

[01:05:00] Car or certainly a truck. I don't want to see ads forthings I don't care about. And you probably don't either. So thetracking, I don't think is a huge deal. The statistics that havecome out from apple recently are very interesting because whatapple ended up doing is they put some new technology and to stoptracking.

[01:05:25] And to stop you from being tracked. And basicallywhat they're doing is a couple of things. One, they've got this newfeature where they will download images and emails from theirwebsite, so that it's not they're not being able to localize whereyou are and then they're also doing something where you.

[01:05:49] Are you are, you can't be tracked like you used to beable to be tracked. Let me just put it simply like thatapplications now have to have that little label warning label inthe app store to let you know what they might be tracking, etcetera. So they've been accepting anti tracking behavior that camefrom our friends from.

[01:06:13] Apple now Google, Facebook and others have been veryupset about this thinking that they were going to lose a lot ofbusiness here in the advertising side, because you wouldn't be ableto track them. So if you've got an apple iOS device, you probablynoticed, it says, allow app to track your activity across othercompanies.

[01:06:36] And websites, your data will be used to measureadvertising efficiency. I don't know that's such a bad thing. Andlooking at the stats right now, I'm looking at Google's income. Anda lot of that comes from YouTube after. Apple launched its newprivacy initiative and it looks like Google really wasn't hit verybadly.

[01:07:00] What Facebook was worried about that they would justbe losing all kinds of revenue. Also didn't turn out to be true. Soit's an interesting thing to see and I've got to really complimentapple again. At this time on trying to keep our informationprivate, I read a really great book this, so this is how the worldends talking about the whole cyber race and where things are likelygoing.

[01:07:30] And it's frankly impressive. To see what Google hasdone to try and keep out our government from their networks, aswell as foreign government and the whole thing with the Chinesehackers we've talked about before, where I've found them. Activeinside our customer's network before. And this is where we getcalled in because there's a problem.

[01:07:57] We look around, we find indications of compromise. Wefind the Chinese inside. Okay. So it isn't something that we wereprotecting them, the Chinese got in, but we come in after the factand have to clean up the mess. But what we have really seen happenhere is the largest transfer in. Of wealth, I should say, inhistory, the largest transfer of wealth in history to.

[01:08:25] From us and from other countries, but primarily fromus because of what they've stolen. And so Google really has foughthard against it. The Chinese have been in their systems have stolena lot of stuff. Apple has fire fought hard against it, but we knowabout the apple stuff. Google's seems to be a little quieter aboutsome of it.

[01:08:45] So they may be selling our information toadvertisers, but there certainly are trying to keep nation statesout. I'm really wondering too, what is Google doing? Moving thatartificial intelligence lab to China. It just it's insane. We knowwe, if we're going to get out of this financial position, we're inas a country, we need to have an amazing new technology.

[01:09:09] So people are coming to the United States and we'recertainly not seeing that. At least not yet. It's all been stolen.So what to do, man. I started talking about that and we got alittle sidetracked. So I will talk about that a little bit morehere coming right up and what to do if you're a consumer, if you'rea business person.

[01:09:32] And of course, as I mentioned earlier, I have. Quitea list. I'm more than glad to send you. If you go ahead and justemail me, M e@craigpeterson.com. I'll keep you up to date, let youknow what's happening and give you those links that you can followto find out exactly what is happening and what you can do.

[01:09:53] Including some tools. There are some tools out thereto check to see if that vulnerability exists inside your networksor systems MI. Ed Craig peterson.com. And I'll be glad to reachout, reach back to you.

[01:10:09] I'm gonna tell you what to do as a consumer becauseof this massive internet hack that is underway. It is huge. Alsogoing to talk a little bit about apple and what they're doing withtheir tracker detect app on Android devices.

[01:10:24] This will be going on for months and probably yearsin some cases, because there are many systems that will never.

[01:10:35] Patched for this vulnerability. So from now on, youneed to be doubly cautious about almost everything, the big targetsfor this. Then people who tend to be the most valuable. Bigbusinesses. And I can send you a list of devices that are known tobe either immune to this they've been fixed or patched and devicesthat are known to have this problem.

[01:11:03] You send me an email. Excuse me. If you have anyquestions about it. So it's me M e@craigpeterson.com. I'd be gladto send you that list. Seesaw has it online. You can certainlysearch for it yourself. If you're interested in. So for you as anindividual, it's just extra caution, use these one time, use creditcard numbers.

[01:11:31] I have talked about this before. And that is, I usefake identities as much as I possibly can online. And I'm nottrying to defraud anyone. Of course, that would be legal. What I'mtrying to do is not make myself as easy at target. As is franklypretty much anybody who uses a computer out there, because ifyou're always using your, in the same name and email address andhaving forbid password, then you are a bigger target than you haveto be.

[01:12:07] And I have a whole index file. I have a spreadsheetthat I put together with 5,000 different identities, differentnames, of course, different sexes, races, origin stories,everything. And the whole idea behind that is why does some companythat's providing me with some little website thing, need my realinfo.

[01:12:31] They don't obviously you give you real info to thebanks or. Counts, but you don't need to give it to anybody else.And that's what I do. That's my goal. So if you can do that, dothat. Apple also has a way for you to use random. Email address asuit can set up a different email address for every website youvisit.

[01:12:57] There are a few services out there that can do it. Ifyou're interested, drop me an email. me@craigpeterson.com. I'llsend you a list of some of them. I think they're all paid exceptfor the app. But you have to have an apple account in order to useit. One of the things that businesses really need to do is do ascan.

[01:13:19] Again, I can send you a list of scanners so that youcan look at your network, see if there's any. Obvious that mighthave huge implications for your business. Again,me@craigpeterson.com, one of the things apple has come up with thatI really have turned out to and I think I mentioned them before onthe air, but it's these news.

[01:13:41] Trackers that apple has, that you can put on things.And we spoke a little bit last week about the problem with thesetrackers being put on to high-end cars, and then being used totrack the car. Now apple got around that problem a while ago, byletting you know, Hey, there is a tracker following you isn't thathandy.

[01:14:04] Wait a minute, somebody dropped one of these littletags into my purse. Coat my car or whatever it might be. And so nowyou can have a look and see where is this thing that's following meand get rid of it. Of course, in order to know that there's one ofthese apple tags tracking, you've needed to have an applephone.

[01:14:26] Because it'll warn you. Apple now has somethingcalled tracker detect. If you are using an Android phone, I wouldhighly advise you to get this app tracker detect app on Android.And it's designed to help you Android users from being tracked byapple airtight. 'cause if you don't know you're being trackedright, then you can't know if you're being tracked.

[01:14:55] If you don't have an iPhone, unless you get this appso good for them, apple has it up now on the Google play store.That's just in the last week or so, and it lets you locate nearbyair tags. So let's I think a very good thing kind of wonder ifapple isn't using the Androids also for part of the.

[01:15:16] Crowdsourcing for the air tags, but that's adifferent conversation. Great article in vice this week by AaronGordon, about how car companies want you to keep paying. Featuresyou already have, and they specifically made a call out about a carmanufacturer. Toyota. Who's now charging $80 a year for people whobought their car years ago, six years ago, $80 a year.

[01:15:51] If you want to keep using the remote start functionon your key. Yeah, so you paid for it and life was good. You went afew years, really nice on a cold winter day or a hot summer day,warm up the car or cool it down all automatically. But now Toyotais charging. $80 a year. So people are saying why I bought it?

[01:16:16] Why would I pay for that? Apple's now claiming thatthe several first years were merely a free trial period, but thisisn't even the big play for these car companies, this $80 a yearfor marginal features like remote start instead. Is probably goingto happen. And I agree with this author as well is we're going tosee a, an approach that Elon Musk has used with his Teslas.

[01:16:47] They're going to charge extra for performance, forrange, for safety upgrades, for electric vehicles that actuallymake the car better car, a better car. So upgrades used to bedifficult or impossible with gas cars. A lot of these are trivialfor the electric cars, with the dashboards that have games that youcan play while you are charging.

[01:17:13] Some of them were complaining about it being for whenthey're on the road. Of course that's going to happen becausefrankly, when, once we get a full autonomous car, what are outs areyou going to do? I should also mention this isn't really a, butMercedes-Benz has been awarded the very first license for themanufacturer sale and distribution of a fully autonomousvehicle.

[01:17:39] The very first they are licensed for up to, I thinkit was 37 miles per hour. On their car and anything beyond that,you still have to retain control, but that's an amazing thing. Andit only works on roads that are mapped. And what Mercedes is doingis they have these super high definition maps. So the car knowsexactly where it is.

[01:18:08] If you are a Tesla owner, you know that a few yearsago, Paid, I think it was $2,000 for your Tesla to be able to driveitself. And of course they haven't been able to drive themselves.They, yeah, there's been features here and there, but how were yougetting those features? How will you going to get that self-drivingmode?

[01:18:30] We'll test those, calling them over the air upgrades.And they're also saying. Th this is part of the Tesla ownershipexperience to quote their website. All right. So they've had allkinds of over the air upgrade. They've had some free software.They've had paid ones, Tesla charges, thousands of dollars for itsautopilot.

[01:18:54] Now a lot of money, I think it was five grand. Nowthey've got this beta driver assist system as well, and they alsohave. To others. You might remember the ludicrous speed. Long rangemodel three would dual motors is capable of accelerating from zeroto 60 in 3.9 seconds. But when you buy the car, the zero to 60 timeis a half a second longer.

[01:19:25] So pay an extra $2,000 and you get that extra halfsecond and accelerate. Yeah, there's nothing different. They don'teven have to change. Really changed the software. There's nohardware differences. It's just, you pay them two grand and they,your cars catheter to the internet and they just unlock a key isnot something.

[01:19:48] Now there some people that hack the way around thatpaywall, but then Tesla blocked it and reversed the hack as well.Tesla has sold their cars now for years with the same 75 kilowatthour battery. But software locked them to 60 and 70 kilowatt hoursmight remember. We talked about this with a hurricane that cameashore down in Texas, where Tesla, anyone in that area providedthem with an automatic upgrade for extra batteries.

[01:20:19] So they could go further in order to get out of thezone of their herd. Before them in software lock-in and a 60 and 70kilowatt hours, unless you paid an additional $3,000 for that extra30 or 40 miles of range. Isn't that something. Yeah. So Tesla hastemporarily unlocked them, but this is where we're going.

[01:20:43] You're going to be going into the car dealershipwhile in Tesla's case. It's on the internet, which I think isbetter. Frankly, dealerships are handy in order to get a repair,but. You can get a repair at some of these little specialty shopsit's often better and certainly cheaper than what the dealershipsells, but you're not only going to be haggling over the price ofthe vehicle and delivery times.

[01:21:08] You're going to be haggling over all of thesedifferent features. And it's never going to end because they'regoing to keep having software upgrades that you're going to have topay for. Pollstar star. This is an electric vehicle company spunoff from Volvo new member. Volvo is now Chinese company.

[01:21:25] Yeah. Chinese. Yeah. So much for safety, right?They're going to charge an extra thousand dollars for a slightincrease in horsepower and torque, just like Tesla does. So this isthe future. Of car companies. Hey, I want to remind everyone, ifyou go to my website, Craig peterson.com. Right now you can sign upfor my weekly newsletter.

[01:21:48] It is packed full of great information for you. Everyweek. We've got some free boot camps coming up after the first ofthe year, and you need to be on my email list to find out about it.CraigPeterson.com/subscribe.

Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity: What Can Be done About Russia? What Can You Do? (2024)
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