How Does Big Government Collaboration With Big Tech Raise the Costs of Everything?

We're going to talk about the Senate bill that has big tech scared, really scared. I'll talk about a new job site problem for a number of different industries because of hackers, the cloud, the cost and reliability.

[Following is an automated transcript]

This tech bill. It has the Senate really scared.

He is frankly, quite a big deal for those of you who are watching over on of course, rumble or YouTube. I'm pulling this up on this screen. This is an article. ARS Technica and they got it originally from wired it's it was out in wired earlier in the month. And it's pointing out a real big problem that this isn't just a problem.

This is a problem for both the legislature. In this case, we're going to talk about the Senate and a problem for our friend. In big tech. So let us define the first problem as the big tech problem. [00:01:00] You're Amazon. You are Google. Those are the two big targets here of this particular bill. We're going to talk about, or maybe your Facebook or one of these other Facebook properties, et cetera.

If you are a small company that wants to compete with any of these big guys, What can you do? Obviously you can do what everyone's been telling us. Oh, you don't like the censorship, just make your own platform. And there've been a lot of places and people that are put a lot of money into trying to make their own platform.

And some of them have had some mild successes. So for instance, I'm on. You can watch my videos there. And there have been some successes that rumble has had and making it into kind of the competition to YouTube. But YouTube is still the 800 pound gorilla. Everybody wants to be where the cool kids are.

So for most people. That YouTube. They look at YouTube as being the [00:02:00] popular place. Thus, we should be, we are obviously saw the whole thing with Elon Musk and Twitter, and the goings on there. And Twitter really is the public square, although it's died down a lot because of this censorship on Twitter.

Interesting. So as time goes forward, these various big companies are worried about potential competition. So how do they deal with that? This is where the real problems start coming in because we saw Amazon, for instance, in support of an internet sales tax. You remember that whole big deal. The internet had been set aside saying, Hey, no states can tax the internet and that's going to keep the internet open.

That's going to help keep it free. And people can start buying online. And that worked out fairly well. A lot of people are out there, why would Amazon support a sales tax on the internet? They are the biggest merchant on the internet, probably the biggest [00:03:00] merchant period when it comes to not just consumer goods, but a lot of goods, like a staples might carry for business.

So they'd have to deal with what they're 9,000 different tax jurisdictions in the United States. And then of course all these other countries, we're not going to talk about them right now, but the United States 9,000 tax jurisdictions. So why would Amazon support an internet sales tax when there's 5,000 tax jurisdictions?

The reason is it makes life easier for them when it comes to competition. So if you are a little. And do you want to sell your widgets or your service? Whatever it might be online. You now have to deal with 9,000 tax jurisdictions. It's bad enough in the Northeast. If you are in New Hampshire, if you live in New Hampshire and you spend more than, I think [00:04:00] it's 15% of your time south of the border and mass, then mass wants you to pay income tax for that 15% that you are spending your time there.

Now they do that with the. Baseball teams with football teams, hockey, you name it, right? So the big football team comes into town. The Patriots are paying the New York jets or whatever it might be. The Patriots have to pay New York state taxes, income tax now because they stepped foot in New York heaven forbid that they try and do business there and help New York state out.

And they now have to pay income tax. Now they only have to pay income tax for, or for the amount of time. They're more New York. Various states have various weirdnesses, but if you're only playing 1, 2, 3 dozen games a year, It isn't like your normal work here, which is 2080 hours. We're talking about their plane to New York and they're only spending maybe 10 hours working in New York, but that [00:05:00] represents what percentage, 10, 20, 30% of their income, depending on how many games they play and how they're paying.

And so they got to keep track of all that and figure it out. Okay. We played in New York, we played in New Jersey. We're in mass. We were they weren't in New Hampshire, certainly the Patriots plane, but they got to figure it all out. Guess what? Those big pay. Football players, hockey, baseball.

They can afford to have a tax accountant, figure it all out and then battle with them. I had a booth one time at a trade show down in Connecticut. Didn't say. Thing it was terrible trade shows, man. They aren't what they used to be. And they haven't been for a long time. This is probably a decade plus ago, maybe even 20 years ago.

So I had a little booth, we were selling our services for cybersecurity and of course, nobody wanted to bother pain for cybersecurity who needs it. I haven't been hacked yet. [00:06:00] Although there's an interesting article. We'll talk about next week based on a study that shows. Small businesses are going out of business at a huge rate because of the hacks because of ransomware.

And if you're worried about ransomware, I've got a really great little guide that you can get. Just email me, me@craigpeterson.com. I'll send it off to you, right? It's a free thing. Real information, not this cruddy stuff that you get from so many marketers, cause I'm an engineer. They'll go out of business.

So they figured I haven't got a business yet, not a big deal. And so no body. There's big trade show. And I was so disappointed with the number of people that even showed up for this silly thing. So what happens next while I get back to the office and about a month to two months later, I get this notice from the state of Connecticut they're tax people saying that I haven't paid my Connecticut taxes yet.

[00:07:00] And because I was in connected. I should be paying my income tax for that day that I spent and wasted in Connecticut. Oh. And plus every company in Connecticut that I'm doing business with now, I need to collect their taxes and pay them the taxes that I'm collecting for those Connecticut businesses are resident.

I didn't sell a thing. You know what it took almost, I think it was three or maybe four years to get the state of Connecticut to finally stop sending me all of these threatening notices because I didn't get a dime from anybody in Connecticut. So I'd love the internet from that standpoint saying you don't have to collect taxes in certain cases, certain states, et cetera, unless you have a legal nexus or a legal presence there in the state. So back to Amazon, Amazon loves the idea of having everything on the internet packs. They love the fact that there's 9,000 plus [00:08:00] tax jurisdictions. When you get right down to city, state county Lilian, either local taxes, or you look at those poor residents of New York state, or they're poor residents out in Washington state that have to worry about that, right?

There's county taxes, state sales tax. City sales tax, and income taxes are much the same, the, all of these crazy cities and states around the country. Yeah. The ones that are in serious trouble right now, they are those same ones. Those particular jurisdictions are hard to deal with. So from Amazon standpoint is just like the Patriots football players.

We've got plenty of money. We've got teams of lawyers. We have all kinds of accountant. We can handle this and you know why Amazon really loves it because it provides another obstacle for any competitors who want to enter the business. That's the [00:09:00] real reason, so many big businesses don't go ahead and charge you serious money so that they can use that money against you.

Okay. You see where I'm going with this? Because if you want to start a business that competes with Amazon, if you want to have a doilies, you're making doilies. My grandmother used to make them all the time and she had them on the toilet paper in the bathroom, little doily holders. Doilies everywhere.

And then of course, the seashells shells on top of the toilet paper holders. If you want to do that and sell it, how are you going to deal online with 9,000 tax jurisdictions? All what you're going to do is you're going to go to Etsy, or you may be going to go to Amazon marketplace and sell your product there.

An Amazon marketplace. So Amazon is taking its cut out of it at is taking it's cut off. And you still ultimately have some of that tax liable. [00:10:00] Amazon loves it. It's the same reason you see these groups forums, right? Barbers saying, oh, we've got to be regulated. Really you need to have a regulation in place for barbers.

You need to have licensing for barbers. Why do they do that? They do that. Not just barbers, right? It's all of these licensures and various states. They do that really to keep people. To keep their prices high. That's why they do it because someone can't just put up a sign and say, Hey, I am now a barber.

Come get a haircut. And if you don't like the barber, if they do a lousy job, you go elsewhere. We don't need all of the bureaucracy on top of this to enforce licensure. Anyways, when we get back, let's talk about that Senate. It's a big deal. And I am coming down in the middle of this thing. Hey, visit me online.

Sign up right now. Craig peterson.com and get my special report on passwords.[00:11:00]

We just talked about how big business uses its advantages to crush potential competition. Crush them. And it's a shame and it's happened to me and many people I know, and now the Senate's getting involved and making things worse.

This is a huge problem. This happened to me a number of years ago, and I will never forget it.

It was a really big lesson for me. I had designed and written a computer system that would take the code that it was written for a much older system. And run it for much less money. So bottom line here, this was a system called Cade computer assisted data entry that was made by Sperry way back in the day.

Yeah. I've been in there for that long and they had little programs, so they would not punch cards, but punch right on two tapes, those big [00:12:00] nine track tapes and that information would then be used for processing later on then. People, big businesses grocery stores, you name it. We're using that Sperry system.

And I designed a system that would take their COBOL is what it was. It was a form of COBOL code from this cage system. And you could use my code to compile it and run it on a Unix system. So the cost involved here was that it would be cheaper to buy a whole new Unix computer and buy new terminals and do some slight training changes.

But the key punch operators would be exactly the same keystrokes as they were already used to. Okay. So you know how fast they were, so it wouldn't slow than none at all. And their cost would be. Then just the maintenance contract on the old Sperry cage. Very [00:13:00] cool stuff. And I worked really well.

Then I worked with a couple of sales guys at spirit because Barry had a Unix tower system. It was a mini computer that was Unix space. And I had one, I had saved up my money. We bought this thing. It was a lot of money nowadays. It'd be about a hundred thousand dollars I spent on that system and it was really great.

Cool. So some grocery stores started using it. They used it to build the space shuttle to design it and send it into space. RCA, Astro space used it, my system, which is all really cool. So Sperry was interested in it saying, okay let's do this. Now. I had flown myself across the country too, because I was in California at the time to do some of this work for.

The for RCA Astro space for the space program and help make sure it was working and get it installed, help them configure it and everything else. So [00:14:00] I had a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of effort into this. It was a big venture. So Sperry invited me down to their headquarters down in blue bell, Pennsylvania to talk about this.

And I was so excited because their sales guys wanted to sell it. They gave me some free space in a booth in Las Vegas. So I was in the Sperry booth with them and, say, yeah, you can buy this. And you're using the Sperry, the new Sperry hardware. And I went down there and talked with them.

They never did anything with me, or, here's a huge investment young guy. And all of this stuff just worked and they had proof of concept. They had a couple of customers already using the system and it never materialized. And then about a year and a half later, I found out Sperry had tried to duplicate my system and had messed it up terribly.

It [00:15:00] wasn't keystroke compatible. So anyone using the new Sperry system, they had to learn. Okay. So I got to hit this and I got to go over here and I got to click on this. Are you kidding me using a mouse? Aren't you not? These are data entry operators. They just go all day long, just typing and.

They had stolen my ideas. They messed it up. They didn't do as good a job as I did, which turns out it's pretty common. And they had stolen it. They stolen years of my life. So I've seen that before with me. I've seen Microsoft do that with friends of mine, and I've seen apple do it with various products that they've decided to release.

They all do it. Why do you think these businesses can not spend money on research and development, and yet at the same time, stay in business as technology's continuing to move forward? Why? The reason is. They don't have to do, or why [00:16:00] would we do T wait a minute. Now, all we have to do is either buy the company or steal the product just re-engineer.

Oh. And if we want to buy the company, we can do what Microsoft has been accused of doing again and again, which is. We'll just Microsoft. Let's see here. I like that database is pretty darn cool. So here's what we're going to do. So Microsoft announces, Hey, we're going to have a competitor to that in coming out soon.

And then they sit there and they wait and they say, okay, how many people are going to ask about, oh wow. A lot of people asking for it. In the meantime, that company that had that great little database soft. Trying to sell it. And people are saying, wait, Microsoft is going to come up with a version of this.

I'm just, I'm going to wait. We can wait a few months. Let's see what Microsoft. So that poor company is now seriously struggling because this big company came out and made the announcement that they're going to do something like this. And then that small company gets a [00:17:00] knock on the door. Hey, we're Microsoft or company X.

And we like your product. Wow. Okay. So we're going to do a buyout. We're going to we're just, oh, this is going to be fantastic. I might have to sign what a two year contract non-compete and help them manage it. Okay. We can deal with this. And then they find out that company X says Your company is not worth that much anymore.

Your sales look at their sales here, man. They've gone way down. Okay. So let me see let's do a nickel on every dollar evaluation you had a year ago. This happens every day, worldwide in America, it should never happen to anyone. And as you can tell, it upsets me. So what are Klobuchar and Grassley doing here?

Amy, when she was running for president, she made this big deal. I'm going to pull us up on my screen. Those of you who are watching [00:18:00] on rumble or YouTube. And you can find all of that in my website, Craig peterson.com can see here. So they are trying to protect the American consumer, right? Yeah.

Yeah. That's it. They're gonna protect us. And so what they're doing is saying that. Would a rule ruin Google search results because that's what Google says. Is it going to bar apple from offering new features, useful ones on the iPhone? How about Facebook? Will it stop them from moderating content? So the legislation's core idea is we will just.

The marketplace take care of things. We're not going to let Amazon put their products in the product listings before third parties, but how are you possibly going to be able to regulate that stuff you can't, you can regulate it [00:19:00] talking about a bureaucracy. You'd probably need one about as big as the federal government is right now.

And the federal government needs to be cut back in a major way. There's this two months. How about the 150 million Americans? This article brings that up to that are currently using Amazon prime, even though the price one hump. And they have it free to prime members. It's this is a big deal.

The bill doesn't mention prime. Doesn't mention Google by name, Amazon. But this is going to be a nightmare to enforce the bill is not specific enough. It should be voted down. And between you and me, I don't know what can be done about this other than to have additional marketplaces show up online. And you know what the conservative social media sites are starting to win.

So maybe there's hope.

We've got two things we're going to talk about right now. One of them [00:20:00] is tech jobs. And man, is there a lot of scamming going on there as you might expect in the second is cloud, are you looking at cloud services? Hey, a home or business.

You can see this. I'm going to pull this up on my screen for those watching on rumble or on YouTube, but this is a big problem.

And we've seen this again and again right now, they're going after certain workers in the chemical. The sector, but it isn't just the chemical sector. What we've seen is the bad guys going after anyone that's applying for a job. So let me give you a few tips here. First of all, you should not be pain to apply for a job.

We see that all of the time when it comes to the head hunting firms, what. Is, they will charge the business who is looking to hire someone [00:21:00] that makes sense to you. They'll hire they'll charge the business. So oftentimes it's a percentage of the annual salary committee where from usually 20% up to a hundred percent or more, depending on the position.

And boy can, they make a lot of money, but they don't necessarily place. People, but you know how it is right now, there, there can be quite a few. So people have been applying for jobs to make a lot of money and not realizing that fee that supposedly they have to pay is illegitimate. So remember that.

Okay. The second thing has to do with this particular scam, because what they're trying to do is. Into some of these companies. So they will send a thing out saying, Hey, on my head hunter, I'm here for you. We're going to get you this job you need to apply. Are you interested in a new job now? I've seen some stats online saying [00:22:00] that somewhere around 30 plus percent of people are looking or at least open to.

Take getting a new job, which means a lot more are looking for jobs. Now I have to add to that, that the people who have jumped ship over the lockdown period really are not happy. The majority of them wish they had stayed where they were at. So keep that in mind too. But what they'll do is they'll say, Hey, listen.

Oh, there's this new feature on LinkedIn. By the way, you can say y'all are, I'm interested in looking for a job. I forget exactly what it says, but it goes around your picture and I have it up there because I'm a contractor, I go to businesses and I'm. To harden their cybersecurity. And we usually start slowly, especially with some of these startups we're doing work with right now where they won't, they go from a completely flat network and [00:23:00] it's all engineers and I don't want anything hindering anything.

And so you got to work with them and it's just, we had a time sort of a thing. Okay. I just had this one thing this week. And then move on to one thing next week as well. So that's what I do for a living. And a lot of people are looking on LinkedIn and other places to find people who can be a chief information security officer.

So I'm what you call a fractional chief information security officer. I do this under contract and I've been doing contracts and contract work for. I don't know if I shouldn't be on the air, but my gosh it's been now I guess it's 40 years right now. So I've been doing this for a long time.

So I'm familiar with some of these scams, so they didn't take my word on some of this stuff. So what they do is they say, Hey, we've got a potential job opening. Are you in interested now? When we talk about 30 plus percent of people polled [00:24:00] say that they're looking interested in a new job, the numbers are probably a little higher. Not that everyone's going to jump ship. Some people will, but there are a lot of people that if they get this email, they're going to open it up. And so what'll happen now is this group out of North Korea called the Lazarus group? And we've talked about them before.

We'll go ahead and say yeah, the here's, what's going to happen here. Let's just send you this thing. You can open it up. You can look at it and see if it's really a fit for you. I love this graphic that they have. This is from dark reading. I have it up on the screen again. Rumble and YouTube.

What should we do now? Should I open this up? Should I not open it up? It turns out that what's happening is that Symantec and Broadcom, both have noticed this and stated in an advisory a couple of weeks ago. Be very careful [00:25:00] because what it's going to do is install a Trojan horse on your computer.

So let's think about this. You're talking about the chemicals. You have a lot of people who are very technical. And if a company wants to get some new technology, we talked about this earlier in the show, what did they do? Do they just go and say, oh, okay, let's get some R and D going here. Let me research and development.

Let's hire some scientists and do some pure science here, which are almost never happens anymore. No, what they do is they either buy a company, they steal a company's idea. If you are like the communist, you try and steal the technology directly. And that's exactly what these guys are doing. They put a Trojan on your machine because you open that file and that Trojan then gives you.

Oh, excuse me, gives them access to your machine. Now this particular Trobe Trojan is a malicious [00:26:00] web file. Disguises. This job offer and your machine gets comparable. They attempt to compromise it, right? It's not always successful. They're not as many zero days out there for these lower level actors like North Korea, but they've been able.

Now, they're not just going after chemical sectors, they're going after it service providers. So companies like mine that provide managed security services for businesses, they are being attacked. So that's a problem too, isn't it? Because if you can compromise. A nine company and we've seen this all the time.

It's getting reported like crazy. You now have access to all of their customers because the it service company has passwords, et cetera. And they're probably using. Industry is number one or number two products for managing the customer's computers, neither of which are secure. [00:27:00] And that's the biggest problem that we've had.

We use some of these things before, I'm not going to name them right now because it wouldn't mean anything to you anyways, but we had to get. We worked with our, it people inside the software companies that make the software that are used by the managed services providers. And we'd talked with their developers and said, Hey, listen, this is a serious problem.

That's a serious problem. You've got to change this. You got to change that. And what ended up happening? We left them because they weren't doing what they were supposed to be doing a very big deal. So they're targeting defense, contractors, engineering firms of any sort. They want to steal IP, intellectual property, pharmaceutical companies.

Yeah. Very big deal. These third hunting teams, including Cisco's, which are the guys that we use. Tallow sets again, an example of a big company buying a smaller company called telos that does threat intelligence and it looks at stuff. They're all reporting to this. [00:28:00] So high level jobs in an industry or what you have to watch out.

It'd be very careful. Now, earlier this year, Lazarus group, again, North Korea went after some of these jobs people 250 that were identified working in the news media, software vendors, internet infrastructure providers, using job offers that appeared to come from. Disney, Google Oracle by the way, that was according to Google who tracked the campaign.

They know what their employees are doing, where they're going, what emails coming in. It's crazy. We're looking a lot of stuff. Okay. So I want to move on to the next topic here. Last one, this hour, but I'm gonna pull this up right now on my screen. You can have a look at it there. Of course, if you are at home.

You can or you really can't on the road. You can see this on rumble and also see this on the YouTube [00:29:00] site. At least for the time being until I get kicked off right. Kicked off again. That seems to be the word of the hour, but cost reliability are raising concerns in. Again, this is a dark reading article, came out a couple of weeks back here, but the biggest concerns about cloud computing to what is cloud computing.

Let's talk about that first for a minute. Cloud computing is going online using something like salesforce.com. People don't think of that as cloud computing. But you have in Salesforce, all the communications with all of your customers, et cetera, that's an example of a platform as a service, basically. So they're providing you with everything and it's up in the cloud, nothing to worry about here, folks, but of course you have the same potential problems.

You do outs where people use what's it called now? Microsoft 365. Which Microsoft disclaimed [00:30:00] any liability for any problems they cause for anything customers it's really crazy, but again, what are the problems there? Reliability slash performance, 50% of the people, 50% applaud on the screen.

Again here worried about reliability and performance, because if your business is relying on cloud computing, What, how is the security any good? That you could use something, as I mentioned Salesforce, and just picking them out of a hat and not, they haven't been like a terrible provider by any stretch.

But how about if you're going to Azure and you're using a workstation news here? How about if you're going to some other place, right? It could be Amazon web services. Google also has data processing services. Security's huge issue. Cost is a huge issue, reliability, performance, all of those. We're issues with more than 50% of the it [00:31:00] professionals.

I'm surprised that this next one, which is our staff skillset on dealing with cog computing 26%. The reason I'm surprised by that is hardly anybody knows enough about cloud computing. Do we really confident about it? I'm serious about that. There's some companies right now, we're talking with a company called Wiz and they audit Azure configuration.

So be very careful if you're using. Particularly if you're a business, it may not work out well for you. Hey, make sure you go online right now. Craig peterson.com/subscribe. Sign up. You'll get my newsletters. You'll get all kinds of great information. Absolutely free Craig peterson.com including my special report on passwords.

Now, if you have any questions, just email me M e@craigpeterson.com.

[00:32:00] There is a whole bunch going on when it comes to Russia, of course, invasion of Ukraine. We're going to talk about that. And what is I can, how does this domain system work and why are people calling to have dot R U deleted?

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

This is an article from ARS Technica, and I've been talking about it all week, which is that I can won't revoke Russian in Jeanette domains, says the effect. Devastating. This is frankly pretty darn fascinating to me because I can, as this international organization, it was put together in order to help make the internet international.

And I'm not talking about the data international, but control of it. A lot of countries work. Because of [00:33:00] course the internet was created in that states. It was created by us tax payers, money for the DOD. And it was designed to be very resilient, in fact, so resilient that there could be a nuclear blast and that nuclear blast and.

Causing problems, but yeah. Yeah, the internet is still going to work. And the whole idea behind it was you could have 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 this information once the least cost way.

What's the easiest way to post way. If you will, for me to get from point a to point B and it changes all the time. So you might be on a phone conversation. You might be listening to me right now, online streaming or watching the video you might be doing, who knows what [00:34:00] out there with digital communications.

But the communications channel that you think you're using, where the data is going from, let's say my microphone, ultimately to your device, your ears, that data path, once it becomes dated. Can be changing multiple times a second. Now it actually changes quite a bit. Initially as these internet backbone routers, send the least cost, routing information back and forth to, and fro a very good thing, frankly, because it helps to speed everything up.

And there's other tricks that we're using you. Might've seen. For instance, Akamai and some of the URLs before have sites that you've gone to, and that's called a content delivery network and that helps get the content to be closer to you. So if you're on a website in California and you're in New Hampshire, that website video, that website graphic, et cetera, is going to be coming from [00:35:00] a server local to me here in New Hampshire.

All right. That's how that all is supposed to work. So we have names you guys know about that internet, domain names and those domain names. You already know those are turned into internet addresses, and those addresses are then used by the routers to figure out where to go, how to get the data. The problem that we're having right now, of course, is Russia seems to be substantially abusing the intranet Putin, put a kill switch on to the Russian internet sometime ago.

And the idea behind the skills, which was, Hey, listen, if we don't want the world to be talking to us, we'll just cut it. Now he's tested it a couple of times, but what he has not done is shut it down and he hasn't shut it down. As part of this Ukraine, more, what they did is they passed laws saying, Hey, if you publish something that [00:36:00] disagrees with what we're saying, you get 15 years.

And even these people who've been protesting on the streets, 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 been saying why don't we just, we turn off the Russian internet now we're not going to use Putin's kill switch in order to shut it all off.

We're not going to do a well, a few things. She decided not to do, denial of service attacks, et cetera. Although there are hackers doing that and we are going to talk about that today, but they're saying what? Let's just go ahead and let's kill their dot R E. The country domain. And I can, the guy who heads it up said, Hey, listen our mission is just to make sure that the internet works.

So shutting off the dot R U domain so that no one can go ahead and. We send right. A [00:37:00] request out to the domain name servers and get a resolution to an IP address. So if you try and go to Kremlin dot REU or something, you will get blocked and you will get blocked. Not blocked. No, I like the great firewall of China or of Russia.

Now they've got one going pretty good. Yeah. Thank you. You ain't using us technology. It's crazy. What we've. But what 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 who have been pushing for it. And you'll see, on my screen here, that Ukraine is requested to cut Russia off from some of these core parts of the internet.

And I can, which is the internet corporation for assigned names and numbers. I couldn't remember what that was earlier said that I can must remain neutral and their mission they say is not to take punitive actions. It's to make sure the internet works. So are they really taking punitive actions [00:38:00] of the cat Russia off?

It's really interesting to me because look at what has been going on. You've got companies like Facebook as the great example who has gone ahead and just shut off people. They didn't like what they were saying. My goodness. At one point of you said you should wear a mask during this pandemic.

You would be cut off from Facebook. And then of course, 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 doing now. It goes on and on. If you said that it came from a lab in China, you would have your account suspended.

Now of course their whole tune has changed and yeah probably came from a lab in China. It's crazy what these people have been doing. So we have arbiters of truth, who are some contractors sitting in their home or wherever it is the contractors for Facebook [00:39:00] that are going through posts that people are flagging as Incorrect as fake news.

So what happens is people say fake news and then that goes 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. We have to have free and fair and open discussions. Don't we. You have that line at Facebook and Google does some of the same.

A lot of these sites do a lot of the same. You get our major media outlets that are all deciding what they want to report on and what they want to label as fake and fake news. I'm just shaking my head because it's hard. It's hard to believe. What about. Russia is putting out fake news, as I've said many times before the first casualty in war, this isn't my quote. The first casualty in war is what, it's the truth. So if [00:40:00] truth is the first casualty, then that means we've got a lot of propaganda going on. We had propaganda coming out of Ukraine. We've caught some of those, like the, what was it? The. Chat goes, fighter, pilot, whatever it was who had killed, what was it?

Five Soviet or Russian jets, Soviet era using silver deer, techno era technology on the part of the Ukrainian turns out well. Okay, that, that was false news. That was fake news. The whole thing about snake island, where you had that Russian military. I know what it was a frigging but anyways boat sitting there saying we are a Russia.

Warship, you will surrender or, whatever. Do you remember that snake on just the small place, 13 guys and supposedly they shelled it and they killed all 13 turns out that was probably fake news as well. So that's from the Ukrainian side and on the Russian side they hardly reported I as to how many.[00:41:00]

The we're in fact, initially for quite a while, they were saying there are no desks. Then at the same time, the Ukrainians are saying they're 2,500 Russians dead. And that number keeps going up, who knows what it is today. It gets really crazy in the time of war. So if Facebook is going to stop someone from saying don't wear masks or do wear masks, depending on what day of the week it is basically right.

Wednesday. It's okay to say that Thursday is not okay to say that we're back. No it's not. Or then why can't that type of censorship? Move on to the next. I that's a big question I have now. Should we be shutting it off? I'll pull this back up on the screen again. And it, this article from ARS, Technica is saying that experts have warned, whoever they are that shutting down the dot R U domain.

Is going to cause just incredible problems [00:42:00] for Russians, which man would it ever talking about a major blow to the economy. And it would also cause problems for people who are trying to find out more truth about. Russia cause you couldn't get to their site. Now we've seen some amazing things in Russia.

We had the Russian, one of the Russian news agencies T, which is broadcasting and here in the U S that their entire staff just walked out saying, forget about it. We're not going to promote this fake news, but this is a little bit different question. Me personally. I don't think anybody should be censoring any.

For almost anything. Yo, there are some limits, but they're pretty extreme in my book. I'd rather know someone is an idiot because they're allowed to say stupid things, and counter, counter it, counter their arguments. You've got to have discussions anyways, stick around. We'll be [00:43:00] right back.

Microsoft. Yeah, they've been around a long time. They've been helping us. They've had lots of cybersecurity problems. People use Microsoft software on their desktop. Some people use it for servers, which is crazy, but listen to what they're doing now.

This is a little concerning. I'm going to pull this article up on the screen.

For those of you who are watching a long, either on rumble or YouTube ARS, Technica article, they have some really great articles. This particular one is about our friends at Microsoft. This is cool. Microsoft announced today? This was like a week or so ago that Microsoft would be suspending all new sales of Microsoft products and services in Russia.

Following the countries, unjustified, unprovoked, and unlawful invasion of. Now Microsoft [00:44:00] didn't give any specifics about the products, but it really is likely to be a blanket ban of all of the Microsoft products. This is very cool because Microsoft has taken an approach I've never seen them do before, which is okay.

When. Gets hacked. You get our friends at apple, putting together patches and getting them out. They get them up pretty quick. Microsoft had been doing much the same. The problem was 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's be like politicians here.

Let's release some very damning news Friday. At about 4:30 PM before a long weekend. So no one will notice. Yeah. Y'all are friends of politicians do that all the time. What Microsoft decided they do is, Hey, wait a minute. We know we're going to have patches. [00:45:00] It's not going to slow down. And because our code is terrible.

So what we're going to do, let me see here. How about we just release all of them at once and we'll just call it patch Tuesday, right? Because people were complaining about how much work it was, how much effort was effort. It was to try. They hate them. These machines apply these patches every day. Huge problem for everybody from home users to big companies out there.

So Microsoft has said, okay let's do that. Let's burry it. So nobody will notice okay that's what Microsoft does. And now we've gotten used to that. Now we have. We remember two guys, right? Bill gates followed by Steve Ballmer. Steve Bohmer was a nut job. Bill gates was a bad man.

I think he's just been trying extra hard to compensate for all of the evil he did over the years. But what we're looking at now is new management and that he's been in [00:46:00] there now for a few years, doing a great job, cleaning up Microsoft, making it a very competitive company. He has done some amazing things.

One of the things that he has decided to do, that's been very effective is how about this? How about we go ahead. And we work with various governments to help stop these Russian hackers. And I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, what was happening and the Microsoft had reached out to the white house and said, Hey, listen.

What we have been looking at the hacks that have been coming from the Russian hackers, and we've been preparing fixes for some of those hacks. How about we work directly with some of these other countries? This reminds me a whole lot of the lend lease program in world war two. You might remember this thing, but the [00:47:00] us of course, initially was not involved in the war and they decided, okay we've got to help the United Kingdom.

How are we going to help them? The UK doesn't have the money to buy ships, to have us make weapons, bullets know. What they did is they had people donate the rifles, the guns ammo from home. Plus they made them the government, instead of selling them to the UK, they lent them to the UK because the UK could not afford everything that it needed in order to fight a war against the national socialist in Germany.

So what did they do? We just shipped the stuff over there and called it a lend slash lease. I think that's a great idea. And what Microsoft is doing is also great idea. They have been decoding, reverse compiling, if you will, and interpreting the code, looking at what some of the ransomware and other malicious code the Russia has [00:48:00] been using against Ukraine, and they have been providing.

All kinds of insight information to these other countries. Now, this is a great idea for a few reasons, one of the reasons, and I think maybe the biggest reason is that the ransomware, the viruses, all of this malware that they're producing is. Not particularly discriminating. Do you guys remember maybe I dunno, what was it?

Six months ago, I taught, told you how to avoid getting most of this Russian ransomware. And it was as easy as just installing. Yeah, installing a keyboard on your computer windows or Mac, windows. Those are the machines are always getting attacked quite successfully most of the time, but the windows keyboard.

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

Why? Because Vladimir poop. Dictator for life of Russia decided he would just go ahead and stop anybody that was trying to hack Russian. Companies businesses, government agencies and what's the best way for the hackers to do that. Cause they didn't want to end up in Siberia for the rest of their lives because of a hack.

Now they went ahead and said, okay if there's a Russian Cyrillic keyboard on the machine, we're not going to activate. So if the software, the malware on your computer, all you need to do is have a Russian keyboard. Yeah, that's it pretty simple. I told you that months ago, now what we're seeing is these indiscriminant [00:50:00] types of software that are being used in Ukraine.

Why doesn't the keyboard trick work while some of Ukrainians peak Russian, we could go in. To the background on that of the massacre, the starvation purposeful starvation of Ukrainians by the Soviet union over many years ago. And how they then gave their property, their homes to Russians to move into in order to occupy Ukraine.

So there's people in Ukraine who are Russian speaking of course. Now we're talking two or three generations, four, maybe down the road from when the Soviet union killed all of those millions of people. But there are some fights that to say, there's Russians, Russian speaking people there. Let me put it that way.

Perfectly. In Southeastern Ukraine anyways I'm going on and on I, this is not an education on war or history. This we're talking about [00:51:00] cyber security. So the, they have, they been, Microsoft found many cases of Russians putting destructive. And disruptive or even more than that data wiping malware onto computers, it spreads indiscriminately.

So Microsoft looking at what's happening, you crane, trying to get patches together for all of us, letting other countries know about what's going on is going to be. Amazing because this malware, which is wiping computers, primarily, it's not really just straight up ransomware give us money and we'll give you your data back.

This is just showing your data, that malware is going to leak outside of Ukraine. Yeah. Cause us all kinds of book tension, probably. When we get back, I want to talk about this here. This is our friend Ilan Musk, and we've been following [00:52:00] along with some of the stuff been going on with his new satellite system in Ukraine.

Stick around.

The whole concept of these satellites and circling the earth, providing us with internet, just regular guides. It's going to be in our smartphones is changing everything. We're going to talk about Elon Musk and what's happened over in Ukraine.

Our friend Elon Musk has done a lot of things over the years. He has really helped us for frankly, the Tesla and what's been happening there.

SpaceX, his main concern being let's get off of a single planet on to multiple planets, right? The movement to Mars, NASA's working on a serious moon base. I reminded him of space 1999. You guys remember that show, but yeah, we're going to have a moon base by then [00:53:00] and it makes a lot of sense. So who's going to go to these well, there's some interesting lotteries people have to apply and everything else, but he's done so much, right?

He's got the boring company you'd already know about Tesla and boring company in case you didn't know makes underground tunnels. He has also. A few other things has got a huge battery manufacturing facility. They're working on new battery technologies to make all of our lives a little bit better, particularly if we have an electric house or electric car, because this is what good is it to have electricity that you can't use.

And that's really what they're trying to do is make it so that electricity is available 24 7 for you. And. Those space X, which is what I mentioned as well as what we're going to talk about right now. I'm going to pull this up on my screen. For those of you who are watching over on rumble, or of course, YouTube, this is fascinating.

He [00:54:00] said there's a high probability of Russian attacks on Starlink in Ukraine. Now that is fascinating because what he's done is he has sent over truckloads. I'm showing a picture of a truck. In fact, with these Starling terminals in it, that's from ARS Technica. Just double-checking it here, but this is very cool.

This is posted by the vice prime minister over there in Ukraine. And they are talking about these terminals. Now a terminal in this case is something that allows your devices to talk to the Starlink satellites, or there's going to be a huge constellation. They've got 2000 satellites up and they're putting another 12,000.

These types of satellites are much different than what we've been used to over the years. We were typically, we've had these massive things sitting up in space. [00:55:00] I worked with RCA Astro space many years ago and I saw. They're testing facilities, which are just incredible. They had this huge vacuum chamber that they brought me in to see as we were working on space shuttle software.

Yeah. I wrote software that they used to put the space shuttle together yeah. Way back in the day. So that was a pretty proud moment. Anyways. It's we're not talking about these huge satellites, like they used to launch, we're talking about very small cell. And they're not just sitting way, way up there.

These are in basically in low orbit around the earth and they're geostationary. In other words, they stay in one spot. I believe this is the way they've got these things set up. So these satellites then allow because they're so close to the earth, allow them to use less power. And also the other advantage to that is.[00:56:00]

The delay, right? The delay between having to send it all the way up and back down, because electricity takes time, right? Yeah. Travels at the speed of light. But nowadays you might'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 of these radio stations or the delay can be absolutely incredible.

Like I half second to a second sometimes. And that's just because they're being cheap. This type of technology where you have these constellations and it isn't just Elon Musk. It isn't just Starling, but constellations with will ultimately we'll have tens of thousands of satellites up there. Not, there's all kinds of other potential problems not getting into that right now.

But what it does mean is yes. Can communicate and we've never had this sort of thing before we had the us military, the Navy in fact, put together a communication system that [00:57:00] lives on top of the internet and called nowadays. Generically the dark web. And it was set up to allow our military, our state department to be able to communicate with people in countries that are back in the day under Soviet control, all kinds of potential problems.

So whenever those problems existed, they just went ahead 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 happens if you're a country like Ukraine, where 100% of your internet comes from Russia, Russia obviously can sit there and listen in.

Hopefully your encryptions. Good. A lot of Russians have been using telegram and already get real news about what's happening in their country and other places. And Della Graham is not that secure, frankly. WhatsApp pretty secure signal is the [00:58:00] one you want to pay close. Attention to signal is considered to be the most secure of all of these secure communications apps.

But there's a level above all of that, because if they can tell that you're communicating, even that is enough to give them some information. So they might not know what was in that transmission, but if the transmission is all of a sudden, a tons of activity coming over, lots of data, lots of messages going back and forth, they can say maybe there's something about to happen.

That came out. You might remember the old orange book for 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 real communication. So it's one thing to have the communications encrypted, but you wanted to always have about the same amount of communications going back and forth.

So people couldn't figure out what you're doing now with these types of devices. That [00:59:00] kind of problem still exists. And this is part of what Elon Musk is warning about here. Pull it up on my screen again, for those people who are watching Elon Musk is urging users of his satellite system to put their Starlink antennas as far as.

From people as possible. Now, why would he be doing that? Because frankly, that terminal is transmitting to the satellite as well as receiving from the satellite. And it is entirely possible that there could be some evil software that is listening in for the satellite transmissions and sends a little missile your way.

Also, of course the Russians have satellites in space that can look down on the ground. Now it's something as small as a terminal four Starlink, little hard to see, but Elon Musk is saying, Hey, listen guys, [01:00:00] go ahead and camouflage it. You might want to spray paint. It just don't use metallic paint so that they can't see it and place it as far away from where people are as post.

So you can still use it and only use it when you need to use it. Don't keep it up and running all the time. But this is the start of something great. Something where you can't easily block people's communication. So Russia has tried to do. And they have been jamming the Starlink satellites. So what did must do?

He delivered all of his engineers to working on how can we get around the Russian Jack? And according to Elon Musk, they have gotten around it and they now have their satellite systems completely jammed free from the Russians. I think that's fascinating. They're probably using some good spread spectrum technology that was actually known about it and world war II.

And then we can talk [01:01:00] about that for a long time. Heady, you might remember her anyways, skip that for now. Stick her out. We got more when we. A whole bunch of pandemonium out there because of what Russia's been doing in Ukraine and how it's flowing over to us as well. Hey, this is not great news.

Pandemonium is the name of the game over there in Russia. And they are being very successful. We're going to talk about what happened in Bella ruse. We'll talk a little bit about what happened in Ukraine with cybersecurity and what's happening right here right now.

I'd also like to invite you guys to listen to me on all kinds of apps out there, including the tune-in app and many others. Let me get my screen set up because now you can also catch me on. And on YouTube, this is almost [01:02:00] a complete, let me pull this up for you.

There we go. Complete ARS Technica today. They've got some great articles this week, looking into the Russians. What are they doing? What kind of problems is that causing us? But we are seeing some interesting attacks back on. And back in very big way. Russia has been going after you crane in the cyberspace for a long time, we spoke a few years ago about what Russia had been doing with the tax software for Ukraine.

We don't do this in the us or in Canada, but my number of European countries do you, where you have to have. The old official tax preparation software put together by the government for your business or for your person, depending on the country you're living in [01:03:00] France is a great example of this. And Ukraine is another one.

So Ukraine says, Hey guys, you got to go ahead and use our software. That means every business in Ukraine is using their software. To manage their tax payments and their accounts, frankly. And that wonderful little piece of software was hijacked by our friends in Russia. So they grabbed a hold of it. They in.

Did some code into it that added rent somewhere to the software. So now all of the businesses in Ukraine are pretty much guaranteed to be using this hacked software. We have a client who has offices over in France, and we found a really interesting problem with them because. The French software that was being used for taxes for French businesses had an extra little [01:04:00] problem.

And that extra problem was, it was insecure as can be whoever wrote this, must've taken a Microsoft programming course and had no idea DIA about the consequences of what they were. So it was very insecure. The, it was using a version of SSL, which is an encryption that's based on another type of increase.

I don't want to get too wonky here, but that was just one of its many problems and bad keys, et cetera, et cetera. And keys by the way, was using keys that had been revoked, which you should never do. Bottom line. Oh my gosh. Hey, if you want more information on this, just drop me a note.

me@craigpetersohndotcomandyoucanalsogetmynewsletterwithallkindsofgreatlittletipsmeatcraigpeterson.com. Just let me know. So in this case, we had to help that company in [01:05:00] France. Ignore the security restrictions that were on their systems so they could use the French tax system. So anyways, I told you that, so I could tell you that the same thing happened to Ukraine.

In a different way, their software was pre infected. So when they downloaded it, ta-da. They got that piece of ransomware that virus had spread. It was just a nightmare. And of course it robbed. If you will, Ukraine, government of funds, that would have been. So we had now a bit of a shift. I'm going to pull this up on the screen again, this article, because what this shift has shown is that the hackers are now operating on the side of you.

Crazy. Which is just fascinating. So the group called anonymous, you might be familiar with them. Of course, they've been doing a lot of hacking for a [01:06:00] lot of years, releasing private information, government and information. All of that sort of stuff. And they have a mast what they're calling a volunteer.

It. And this it army has been going and doing what well hacking Russian sites apparently. So this article is just absolutely 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, made it all the way on to the.

The space agency was hacked in their website said, leave Ukraine alone, Alto anonymous. Will you up even more? They also did. What's called a D O S. Which is a distributed denial of service attack. Those can be [01:07:00] very difficult to protect against unless you're set up in advance to help protect yourself.

And that pretty much destroyed Russia's dot are you top 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 knocked off the air because no one could really get to them.

They used amplifying attacks and stuff without getting into all of the details. So basically they were trying to cut off access and they did for a lot of people to any. That ended in, are you? It's great. These are just some of the latest in this surge of hacktivism. That's been going on one of the ones I mentioned a couple of weeks ago with the Belarusians deciding they were going to hack the Belarus railroad, which was being used.

To bring Russian [01:08:00] troops, supplies, tanks, et cetera, all on rail, right on down right to the border of Ukraine. So that was hacked so that they couldn't use it in order to go after. Of course Russia was able to get to Ukraine, but there's also been protests around the world. 48 Russian cities raise millions of dollars through cryptocurrency donations.

Now, I'm not a big cryptocurrency guy and I'm not a big crypto currency guy because while. Cryptocurrency is likely to be outlawed by most, if not all governments. And they certainly could shut it down and it is not anonymous. All right. So using cryptocurrency does not mean it does not equate to completely anonymous.

They have done a lot of donations. They're big companies including, we [01:09:00] just talked earlier about Microsoft, but also apple shell, BP, a McDonald's Starbucks. And these hacktivists have really joined in. And w we talked about a couple of other things, 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 distracting because we are now in a hot war right now.

Maybe we don't have our. Eric planes bombing Russian movements or other things, but there is a kinetic war going on over there. There are bullets, et cetera, mean exchanged. So the hacktivist efforts have been, visible. There's no question about that. But what have they done? See, [01:10:00] that's an advantage to being a country like Russia, or like the Ukraine, or excuse me, Ukraine, because both of those countries there, their industrial base, the military industrial base is not heavily automated unlike ours.

What could you do? What can you shut down? So what you shut down the Russian space agency's website, how far did you get into it? Probably not very far. We also have a couple of groups and we talked about these guys many times the Conti group, which has been.

Terrible and hurting us businesses, individuals, government agencies, and stuff, the Cuming project, both of them have declared their allegiance to Russia. You might remember a few weeks ago, we talked here about how we have had some researchers track down most of these Russian hacker groups and their money.

And they all ended up in one building in Moscow. [01:11:00] No, that should tell you something, right? In fact, the most expensive real estate right there in downtown Los gal, the tallest building, et cetera. So these groups getting together in order to protect the father land there in Russia. Ah interesting problem.

How much of this is really controlled by the Kremlin? It's a very good question. Context. Was dismantling its infrastructure. It, some of their top people were arrested by Putins military. Not military, but police state over there. And that was interesting too. That was again before the invasion, but why would Putin be shutting them down at all?

Apparently they said some things. That they shouldn't have said. So now they've come out and have decided they're going to support Russia in its entirety. Now we mentioned Microsoft and how [01:12:00] Microsoft has decided they are going to protect other countries. As well as you crane, at least as far as the Russian malware goes, and they've been very active in that.

And there are a number of cybersecurity companies and other organizations that have released free versions of some of their software, these digital defense tools. Free offerings. Our big cranes defend the networks. Google says it's human rights focus de dos protection service project shield is now in use by more than 150 Ukrainian websites.

So it's very good. Bottom line propped up by the way, published this massive trove of personal data. Allegedly identifying 120,000 Russian soldiers deploy. In Ukraine that was Ukrainian prov, not the old good old Russian Sophia Pramata man. I [01:13:00] remember I bought one of those on new standing Canada once.

And I had a friend who was from Yugoslavia and he said, oh, can I show that to my wife? He showed it to his wife. She tore it up. I said, I want my Pramata, Craig Peterson got calm.

How Does Big Government Collaboration With Big Tech Raise the Costs of Everything? 01:13:14 Share

Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity

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How Does Big Government Collaboration With Big Tech Raise the Costs of Everything?