Mar 18, 2022
Why Is Russia PasswordSpraying Hurting You?
What Are They Trying to Do?
And What Is It?
This is one of the top topics I've had people ask about lately:How can you protect yourself and your business against Russianhackers? So I've got a presentation. We're going to run through it.We're going to talk about what you can do about it.
[Automated transcript follows]
This has been a long time coming. I have been doing a lot overthe years of webinars of online meetings, trying to help peopleunderstand what's going on, what can be done.
[00:00:28] And I got a great email this week from one of thelisteners. Who's been a man on my email list now for years, I'm noteven sure how many years. And he was saying, Hey, thanks for givingall of this information for free for small businesses. And affordit. And I got to thinking because there've been a lot of requestslately, for instance, backups how should I be doing them?
[00:00:52] What should I be doing? And a number of other topicsthat really all go together into the, how do I protect myself, mybusiness. From ransomware from these Russian hackers. So that'swhat we're going to be talking about today. We're going to gothrough a few of these. This is going to be a series.
[00:01:10] We're going to continue this here and weeks ahead,and I appreciate all your feedback. And if you miss part of it,make sure you email me just M. Craig peterson.com. Let me know, andI'll be glad to send some of it to you. Now I'm recording this onvideo as well. So it's great when you're driving around andlistening in picking up some tidbits.
[00:01:34] And if you do want to see the recorded version again,dropping them in an email to me@craigpeterson.com or search for meon YouTube or on one of the other sites that are out there likegrumble and you'll. This as I release it. Cause this is going totake a few weeks to really get into the whole thing.
[00:01:55] So let's get started. I'm going to pull this up here.Full screen. For those watching at home and what this is calledtoday, we're talking about protecting your business and your selffrom Russian hackers because they have been out there. They havebeen causing just all kinds of problems, but there's a few thingsthat you can do.
[00:02:18] And I have them up on the screen here. Let me pullthem up, but I want to get into the background first. Russianransomware group. They're a bunch of bad guys and it's calledConti. Now. Conti has been around for a long time. These are theguys that have been ransoming us. They're the guys who ran to meanthe businesses they've been rants.
[00:02:40] Government, you might've heard them. They've got intohospitals. They have been all over the place and they've raised awhole lot of. For the Russians. I'm also going to tell you about acouple of things you can do here. Cause there's a real neat trickwhen it comes to keeping Russians out of your computers, but Contidecided, Hey, listen, we are all for Russia and president andPutin.
[00:03:03] So they came out with an official warning, oh, I wantto read this to it says if anybody. We'll decide to organize acyber attack or any war activities against Russia. We are going touse our all possible resources to strike back at the criticalinfrastructures of an enemy. Yeah, no, not the best English, butmuch better than my Russian.
[00:03:25] I got to say that I know two words or so in Russian,but they said that they were announcing full support for president.That's a pretty bad thing. If you asked me, they also have ties toRussian intelligence intelligence, but what are we talking aboutreally? Think of the KGB.
[00:03:43] The FSB is what they're called nowadays, but directlytie. China and North Korea, Iran, or also now tied in with Russiato varying degrees, but all of them are a little bit concernedabout getting into it a little too much, but we're going to talkabout their tactics. That's what's important today. What are theydoing?
[00:04:05] Why are they doing it? What can you do about. So thefirst thing is password sprain. This is big deal. I've got a nicebig slide up here. I like that color blue. I don't know about you,but I think it's pretty, but password sprain is something we allneed to understand a little bit better. It's a brute force attackthat has been really hurting.
[00:04:30] Many of us. Let me see if I can get this to work. Forsome reason it has decided it just doesn't want. Let me see here.What is up? Oh, is something isn't it's just, I'm getting a whitescreen, but it's a brute force attack targets users who have commonpasswords. Now this is a problem. When we're talking aboutpasswords.
[00:04:55] If you have a password that has been breached in anyof these breaches that have gone on over the last, however long,right? 30 years plus now that password is known to the bad guy. Sowhat they'll do is they'll take that common password and they'llstart to try it. So password sprain is where they will go to a banksite or they'll go to Google.
[00:05:21] The, oftentimes they're trying to get at your emailaccounts. So if you have Google email or Yahoo or Hotmail, they'lltry it. Use passwords that they have found against accounts thatthey have found on those various sites that ends up being quite abig problem for everybody out there. Okay. I got that screen backhere.
[00:05:42] So I'll put that up for those people who are well.But they will send multiple times attacks using variations of thesepasswords. And it's known as a low and slow method of passwordhacking because if they were to go bam, and send all of thesepasswords and login attempts. They get caught.
[00:06:06] The automated systems would say, Hey, wait a minute.This is not good. We're going to cut you off. In fact, that's whatI do for my client. We have remote access using SSH, which is a anencryption session so that we can have a terminal session. And ifyou try and log in three times, We automatically zap you,right?
[00:06:28] We shut you down. So they take a very slow approachto this password sprain technique. And they're also going aftervolume, which makes a whole lot of sense. And there are right now,billions of passwords usernames, email addresses that have beenstolen that are sitting out in the dark. So you've got to make surethat you are not reusing passwords.
[00:06:54] How many times have we talked about that? You've gotone common password that you're using over and again, while that'sa problem, but they're not going to keep hacking your account.They're going to switch from one account to another because theydon't want to get locked out.
[00:07:09] Just like I lock out somebody who's trying to get in.So if someone's coming from that same. IP address that sameinternet site. And they're trying to log into that same accountmultiple times. Bam. They are gone. So with path's word sprain,they're trying to get around the problem of you noticing they'retrying to get into a bunch of different accounts and they try andleverage it.
[00:07:34] So they'll oftentimes use multiple computers thatthey've stolen access to. We've talked about that before too. Itgets to be a real big. Now they're also targeting these singlesign-on and cloud-based applications, because once they're on.Using one of these federated authenticated authenticationprotocols, they can mask the malicious traffic.
[00:08:00] We've heard some of these hacks lately where they'reusing a token that they managed to pick up from somebody's email, Iaccount, or they got onto Microsoft and they got into the emailaccount on Microsoft. That happened recently. In a supply chainattack, solar winds. You heard about that 20, 21, right?
[00:08:21] So they're going after these email applications,including Microsoft or Microsoft has done they're going afterrouters and internet of things, devices for a very good reason,those IOT devices, which are things like your smart lights, theycan be. Controlling the cameras outside, they go on and on there'sthousands, millions of them.
[00:08:44] Now I actually all the way through your microwave,they tend to not be very well protected. So that's a real bigtarget for them. So step. They want to acquire a list of usernames.Step two, they're going to spray the passwords. Where do they getthose passwords in those usernames? Or they get them frombreaches.
[00:09:06] So again, if you have an account that's breached atsome online shopping site, a big one, a small one, it doesn'treally mean. That particular breach is now well known and they can,will and do gain access to your account which is step three, gainaccess to it. It gets to be a serious problem.
[00:09:26] Okay. How do you know if you are under attack? Numberone? There is a spike in failed. Log-ins this is where having asystem and there's technical terms is tough for this. I'm trying toavoid a lot of those terms, but this is where the system iswatching logins, noticing that there's a problem and going aheadand stopping it, not just noticing that, but stop. Very importantto do. There are a high number of locked accounts, which means whatit means that again, someone's been trying to log in. You shouldmake sure that your account, if there are invalid, lock-insautomatic. Locks it out after some number of attempts and fiveattempts is usually considered to be okay.
[00:10:14] I know on my phone, for instance, I have a highernumber of the neck, cause sometimes the grandkids get at it. Butwhen it comes to your business account, when it comes to your bankaccount, you probably don't want to have a whole bunch of. Of aattempts, and then in known or valid or invalid, I should say userattempts again.
[00:10:36] Why are they trying to log in with a username thatjust doesn't exist? Yeah, it can be a problem. Hey, when we comeback. We're going to talk about some steps. Like you can take hereto really remediate, maybe even stop a password spraying attack.I've already given you a few ideas here, but what are some act ofthings that you can do, particularly for a small business to reallyprotect yourself?
[00:11:04] Hey, stick around. We'll be right back. Craigpeterson.com.
[00:11:10] Russia has, hacking our computers, Russia'scontinuing to hack our computers and this is a real problem. So weare going to talk right now about how to stop some of these things.We already talked about password sprain. How do you start?
[00:11:26] There are a lot of things we have to pay attentionto, and that's what I'm going to be doing in the weeks ahead.
[00:11:33] We're going to be going through some of the thingsyou need to do to keep yourself safe. Keep your business safe inthis really dangerous online. There are so many things going on. Somany people that are losing their retirement businesses, losingtheir operating accounts. We've seen it before with clients of ourswhile you know their clients now.
[00:11:59] And it was just a devastating thing to them. So Idon't want that to happen to you now, if you are interested. All ofthis is recorded and I am doing this as video as well. We've gotslides and you can find out more about it. Just email me Me@craigpeterson.com. It's really that simple. And I didn't let meknow.
[00:12:24] And I'll be glad to send it off to you. Okay. This isavailable to anybody I'm trying to help. And we've had a lot ofemails recently about some of these things. So th this is coveringeverything from the password spraying we're talking about right nowthrough backups and other things that you need to do.
[00:12:43] Let's get going on our sprain problem. So w what arethe steps that we need to take an order to really remediate againstone of these password spraying attacks? And frankly, it is. Oh, alot to do. It has a lot to do with our users and what we do, ifyou're a business, if you are an individual, we need to be usinglonger passwords.
[00:13:12] Now we're not talking about all of these randomcharacters that we used to have. I remember having to have mypassword be at least four characters, long APAC, when didn't evenhave to have a username, it was just all based on the password. Andthings changed over the years, the latest standards that are outthere right now come from this too, which is the national Institutefor science and technology.
[00:13:37] They are the guys that put together, all of theguidelines said federal government and businesses need to follow.And they're telling us that a longer passwords means elaborate passphrase. So you should use 15 character passwords. I had an articlejust a couple of weeks ago saying that an eight character passwordcan be cracked almost instantly, certainly within an hour, anyeight character password.
[00:14:08] So if you're still using that, you've got to make achange. And obviously nine characters is a lot more possibilities,takes a lot longer to crack. I don't have those numbers right infront of me, but 15 is the ideal. So use pass phrases instead ofsingle words. So phrases like I don't know secretary of one, theKentucky.
[00:14:34] There you go. There's a phrase. So what you would dois put, maybe dashes between each one of the words. Maybe you wouldgo ahead and use a comma, put some numbers in there, put somespecial characters in upper lowercase, right? So it's basically onuncrackable at that point. And that's what you want.
[00:14:53] Next one. When we're talking about rules for yourpasswords, the best passwords are the passwords that you canremember without writing them down and words that don't make senseto anyone else's. I remember taking a memory course a few yearsback and they had random words and you had to remember them.
[00:15:18] And the whole idea was okay, visualize thishappening. And as I recall, man, it's been a lot of years I won'tsay decades, but it hasn't been. Since I did this, I still remembera part of it, it was first word was airplane. Next was allenvelope. The next one was paper clip. Next one was pencil.
[00:15:38] So I visualized an airplane flying into an allenvelope and that all envelope then goes into a paper clip and apencil writes on the outside. Like it's addressing it to someone.That is a good little password, actually airplane or envelope,paperclip, a pencil with a mixed case and maybe a number two orspecial symbol thrown in.
[00:16:05] Those are the types of rules that we're talkingabout. The types of rules that really. Next up here. Oops. Wrongkeyboard. Stay away from frequently used passwords. We've talkedabout this many times. If you're using one of the better passwordmanagers, like for instance, one password, you will automaticallyhave any passwords that you are there in Shirin or that it createsyou'll have them checked via a website out there.
[00:16:37] It's called. Yeah. Okay. It's called. Have I beenponed I, and I hated to say this because how do you spell it? It'sall one big, long word. Have I been poned to.com and poned is P w NE d.com. It will tell you if a password that you're trying to useis a known password. If it has been found out in the wild,okay.
[00:17:02] Use unique passwords for every site you visit, Ican't stress this enough. We were talking about password sprain. Ifyou use the same password and email address on multiple sites,you're in. Because all they have to do is try your email addressand your password for whichever site it is that they might want totry out.
[00:17:27] Remember, many of them are trying to get into youremail and they have done that successfully. With Microsoft email,if you have their Microsoft 365 service and you might want to readthe fine print there very carefully, because Microsoft does notguarantee much of anything. You make sure you back it upyourself.
[00:17:50] Make sure you do all of these things becauseMicrosoft just plain, isn't doing them for you. Next one here. Nextup is our password manager. And I mentioned this before installingand using a password manager is phenomenal. It automates thegeneration of passwords. If you have. Integrated with your webbrowser.
[00:18:15] It now allows your web browser to work with yourpassword manager. So when you go to a site, you can have it pull upyour passwords. How could it be much easier than that? It's reallyrather simple. That way it's keeping track of your logins. Andagain, One password.com is the one I recommend and people getconfused.
[00:18:36] When I say that, when I'm saying one password, Idon't mean only have one password used for everything. One passwordis a name of a company. Okay. So it Talking about only having asingle password, but use a password manager. And I've got all ofthese up on the screen right now. If you're interested in gettingcopies of these, you can go ahead and just email me Me@craigpeterson.com.
[00:19:04] And I'll make sure I send you a copy of the slidedeck of this presentation as well. Cause this is just so important,frankly, but having these points is going to be huge for you. Nowstrange activity. That's another very big deal. And we're going totalk about this when we get back, what is it?
[00:19:25] What does it mean? But I'm going to hold off the restof this, I think for another week. But right now, what let's hitthis, we're talking about odd log-in attacks. A lot of loginattempts, the excessive login attempts trends in unusual activitiestake any, you need to basically take measures to block it anddetermine if this activity is legitimate.
[00:19:50] Is someone just for forgetting their password andspraying themselves or what's going on? Okay. There you go. Simple.Hey, everybody, you can find out a lot more and you'll be gettinglinks to this automatically to these videos, et cetera. If you'reon my email list, Craig peterson.com and you can email me Me@craigpeterson.com.
[00:20:15] We'd be glad to send you this or any otherinformation I might have. All right. Take care. We'll be rightback.
[00:20:23] Putin has been working for a while. In fact, it lookslike as early as September in 2021, Putin started going after majorus corporation. So we're going to talk about that. And what does itmean.
[00:20:39] Putin has been going crazy for a while. I'm going toput this up on the screen for those of you who are watching eitheron rumble or YouTube, but Putin planned this whole invasionapparently quite a while ago.
[00:20:56] And I got an article from the Washington post up onMSN talking about what Putin did at least a little bit about whathe did. And you can see right here if you're following. ThatRussian agents came to the home of Google's top executive andMoscow. And what they did is gave an ultimatum. They told thatGoogle, a senior executive that they needed.
[00:21:24] Pull down an app that was in use in Russia. And thisapp was polling. It was for people to do polls and say, Hey what doyou think about Putin's garden performance, et cetera. We do themin the U S all of the time you hear about the polls right left andcenter. Poland, which is a small country next to another smallcountry called Ukraine next to a large country called Russia.
[00:21:50] But we're talking about Paul's favoribility polls.What do you think they should be doing? What do you think that thegovernment should be doing and maybe what they should not be. SoPutin didn't like this. He didn't like this at all. And so what hedid is he sent a couple of guys ex KGB, FSB, the secret police overin Russia by to visit this Google executive.
[00:22:16] If you're the Google executive, what are you going todo? If you Google. Yeah, you're going to say, oh my gosh, I'm outof here. So I'm not sure if she, if this executive was an Americanor Russian, this article doesn't seem to be clear about it, butwhat happened is they said, okay let's go hide.
[00:22:41] So they rented a hotel room for the. They put her init and they rented the room under an assumed name. So it wasn't thereal name of the executive. It wasn't tied into Google and theythought, okay, now we're pretty safe. Cause you got a hotelsecurity, I guess there are a couple of Google people hanging outwith her and they felt pretty safe.
[00:23:04] What happens next? There is a knock on the door.These same agents, again, that are believed to be Russian secret.Police showed up at her room and told her that the cock was stillticking because they had given her 24 hours for Google to take downthe app because Putin, dental. People weren't particularly pleasedwith Putin.
[00:23:31] So at that point, of course it was forget about it.And within hours, Google had pulled down the app. Now you mightcomplain, right? A lot of people might complain about it. It's onething for a company like Google or apple to capitulate, to agovernment to do maybe some censorship, like the great firewall ofChina.
[00:23:54] You might've heard of that where the Chinese citizenscan't get certain information. Russia has something pretty similarand us companies have gone ahead and helped build it, provided thetechnology for it and put it in place. They sold it to them. Idon't like that in case you didn't guess, right?
[00:24:12] I'm all for free speech. I think it's very importantfor any form of a democracy. No question about it, but thesecompanies apparently don't have a problem with that. However, nowthis is something, a little different. If you have employees whoare being threatened and I mean threatened to serve 15 years in aRussian prison, what are you going?
[00:24:39] Are you going to say no, I'm going to leave that appup. And then now all of a sudden your executives, or even a coder,somebody a programmer, like the guy that sweeps the floors,whatever are you going to let them be arrested so that you can havethis app up on your Google play store or your app store over theapple side?
[00:24:59] Probably not because frankly, this is something thatis not worth it. So what are you. I think the only answer is whatwe've seen company after company do, and that is get out of Russiacompletely. And there was an interesting story. I read thisrecently about McDonald's you might remember back in the Sovietdays, McDonald's worked out this deal with the Soviet union to opena McDonald's right there in downtown Moscow.
[00:25:32] I guess it was pretty prominent. I don't know if itwas, I think I might've been even on red square and there werepeople like. To have an American hamburger and it's been prettypopular the whole time. McDonald's closed that store and pulled outof the country. Starbucks has pulled out, are they going toreopen?
[00:25:50] Cause I don't think either one of them said, forgetabout it. We're not coming back, but I know both of them haveclosed on operations. Automobile manufacturers from the U S haveclosed on operations. What is their choice? You can't just go aheadand say, okay yeah. Okay. Yeah. You're just going to arrest peopleor, we'll keep quiet for now and come back later.
[00:26:12] What are you supposed to do? That's part of theproblem with these oligarchies, with these people who are basicallyall powerful. Now we actually see some of that here in the us,which is just as shame, just a shame because we see these companiesgoing ahead and cutting out free speech saying, oh, you can't saythat there was a time where if you said masks work, that you wouldhave been censored. And then there was a time where if you saidmasks don't work. You cloth mass don't work, you would have beencensored. There was a time when you said masks aren't necessary.You would have been censored right now, but the science issettled.
[00:26:56] It was just crazy. Science has never settled and oh,we could go on with this for hours and hours, but potent is not agood guy. And this article, I'm going to bring it up on the screenhere again. But this article talks about. And a single year. Andagain, this is MSN. Potent had his political nemesis, Aloxi Novolinnovel ne yeah, I got it right.
[00:27:23] He had him in prison after a poisoning attempt,felled to kill him. Do you remember that whole poison attempt?Where they gave him this really nasty radioactive bride product, asI recall, and potent went ahead and basically shut down. Theypushed all of these independent news organizations to the brink ofextinction.
[00:27:46] Look at what happened with Russia today. The entirestaff walked off on the. Saying, we're not going to report on anyof these lies that are coming out of Moscow. It's happened againand again, Putin orchestrated a Kremlin controlled takeover ofRussia's Facebook equivalent, and he's also issued liquidationorders against human rights organizations.
[00:28:12] And so all this is going on. What are you going to doif you're. If you're a Google, right? I can see the criticism ofthose countries or companies should say when they're cooperatingwith the regimes, putting in place, things like facial recognitionto, to spy on people, to have a social credit system, these greatfirewalls in these countries.
[00:28:34] But when you have something like this happen, Iforget about it. There's nothing you can do. And the crackdown isaccelerated Facebook and Twitter were knocked offline by thegovernment for millions of Russians news outlets had survived thestate harassment for years, shut down in the face of a new lawimpose.
[00:28:55] 15 year prison sentences for spreading fake news.It's incredible what has happened. And we've got to be careful herein the U S too, because we see this censorship, there's a lot ofcomplaints about what was happening under Donald Trump presidentand old Biden, both Obama and Biden.
[00:29:15] Both of those have done some of these same things toa lesser extent. Stick around. We'll be right back.
[00:29:23] This whole war with the crane, Ukraine and Russia hasbrought a few things to light here over the months, and really themore than year that it's been leading up to the beginning of thatwar even, but we've got clear view in the news again. Yeah.
[00:29:39] am also besides broadcasting this on the radio, we'redoing it in video two. So you can always follow along at rumble orat YouTube, but there's a great article here.
[00:29:52] I have up on my screen for you to see. And this isfrom writer. Para carried over on MSN. And it is an exclusive storytalking about Ukraine, using something called clear views. AIfacial recognition. This to me is absolutely fascinating becausewhat is happening. Is the technology that Clearview develop and hasit been selling to police forces in the United States is being usedon the battlefield and.
[00:30:27] How here's what the technology did. And doesClearview illegally went on websites, major websites all over theworld and did what we call scraping. Now, scraping is where they goto the site and they grab the pictures. So they scraped Facebook.They scraped you tube. They scraped. Dan and many more.
[00:30:54] And then they put it all into a big database thattold them where they found it, who that person was. And then theyalso took that biometric information from that image of the faceand came up with some unique codes, a hash basically is what theydid. And. Now what Clearview is doing is if you are a policeorganization, you can get a little app that runs right there onyour.
[00:31:22] And you have an encounter with someone you're apoliceman, right? Let's say, and you just hold the camera up and itgets a picture of that person. It now finds the backgroundinformation on them. And then you can use that tied into the policedatabases to check and see if there's any record of thisperson.
[00:31:42] If they've been doing anything illegal. It's reallyquite cool. What they're able to do and scary at the same time, weuse the same basic technology over in Afghanistan. So literarytroops as they're out, and they're having encounters withcivilians, people in the streets, fighters, et cetera. They couldhold the device up.
[00:32:04] It would identify them. It went further than just theface that actually did retinal scans and things, all kinds of coolstuff, but basically recognize the face. And they were able to tellif this was a friend of foe or. So a friend might be someone whoworked as a translator who has been known to be helping the ustroops in Afghanistan, et cetera.
[00:32:29] So we built this huge database of hundreds, ofthousands of people's biometrics person, very personal informationin it. And if they were getting paid even how much they're gettingpaid, all of that was in the database, in the backend. And then weabruptly. And we left that equipment behind. I hope the databasewas destroyed.
[00:32:52] I haven't found anything. Absolutely conclusive onit. That the withdrawal from Afghanistan was frankly unforgivable.It just I can't believe they did what they did at any rate. This isClearview. This is this company. So now that same technology hasmoved to Ukraine. What's interesting. About this whole Ukrainianthing to me was okay, great.
[00:33:18] Now they can identify people. Can they reallyidentify a pretty much everybody? Who are they going to identify?As it turns out clear Clearview also illegally stole photos ofpeople over in Russia and in Ukraine. So the clear view foundersaid that they had more than 2 billion images from. How's thatright from this social media service called V contact a or somebodylike that out of a database of 10 billion photos total.
[00:33:52] So one out of five of the pictures they scraped wasRussian, which surprised me. So the Ukrainians have been using itto identify dead Russian. And it's, they're saying it's much easierthan matching fingerprints even works. If there's facial damage,it's scary to think about right. Wars, terrible.
[00:34:14] Who wants to go to war? I can't believe all of thepeople that want to jump in there. I really feel for these peoplein Ukraine, what can we do? I'll start approximately. Research forthe department of energy, found the decomposition, reduce thetechnology's effectiveness while a paper from 2021 showed somepromising results.
[00:34:36] Now, this again is an example of technology beingused in a way it's never been used before. And having that abilityto identify dead or living combat combatants on a field like thisis just amazing. So this is the most comprehensive data set.There's critics, of course, they're saying that the facialrecognition could misidentify people at checkpoints, obviously,right?
[00:35:04] Could miss identify people in a battle mismatch couldlead to civilian deaths, just like unfair arrests have risen frompolice use. And that's from Albert Kahn, executive director ofsurveillance, technology oversight, product, project, and new. Soas usual, these things can backfire and I think they probably willgiven a little bit of time and that's a sad thing.
[00:35:31] Now I also want to talk about this. This is cool.Another article here, I'm pulling up on the screen right now. Andthis is about some hackers. Now we know that the Kremlin's beenlying. We know that if a politician's lips are moving their line,isn't that the old standby, but Russians apparently don't knowthis.
[00:35:56] And the average Russian on the street is thinkingthat, okay, we're rescuing Ukraine. Isn't that just a wonderfulthing. There's a couple of ways that the hackers have been gettingaround it. It's called a squad 3 0 3. They have this tool that'shosted at the domain. 1920 dot. There's an Indian domain and itloads a pre-written statement in Russian into your native SMSapp.
[00:36:29] In other words, the app that you use for texting andthe idea is they that they've taken, oh, let's see here. Tens ofthousands of trying to remember the exact number of stolen phonenumbers from Russia. So all of those hacks that we've talked aboutfor all of these years, those hacks have many of them phone numbersin them.
[00:36:54] And they've been taking those phone numbers from someof those hacks and using them to send out about 6.5. Million textmessages. So what happens is you, your phone, your actual phoneends up sending a text in Russia saying something to the effect ofdear Russians. Your media is being censored. The Kremlin islying.
[00:37:18] Find out the truth about Ukraine on the freeinternet, and then the telegram app time to overthrow dictator.Yeah, that's not going to cause any problems, is it right? I'll putthat up on the screen again for people who might read Russian.Cause it's got it in Cyrillic. Okay. And then you have the optionto get an, another set of text and figure it out.
[00:37:40] So the phone number, you can see there, you can copyit and paste it into your app and off the message goes. It's verycool. And in the daily dog, They're quoting a member of this squad3 0 3 saying that this is a non-violent communications project.It's bypassing Russia's crackdown on the news.
[00:38:02] They're sensitive. They're censorship of the news.And by the way, the domain 1920 dot. Refers to Poland's surprisevictory against Russian forces just after world war one and theBolshevik Menshevik revolution. You might remember all that stuff,that you studied all those years ago. So it's interesting.
[00:38:23] We'll see what happens. But this hacking group alsoclaimed that they were attacked probably again by Russian hackers,the FSB ex. Using a distributed denial of service attack shortlyafter launch. And they put CloudFlare in front of their domain. Nowwe use CloudFlare for one of our, something, not one, but some ofour customers.
[00:38:50] What CloudFlare is a website that's designed tobasically buffer your website when it's been served. So if all of asudden you get a ton of legitimate request, your site's going tostay up. It's going to be able to respond to people. The other bigadvantage to CloudFlare is what's happening here with 1920, DianeCloudFlare goes ahead and will block some of these denial ofservice attack.
[00:39:19] So I think that's pretty darn cool. Many textsapparently are met with silence. Some say they've been able toconverse with Russian citizens. One user who remained anonymoussaid they had made. The text messages they'd made using the toolreally worked it says, I want the people of Russia to know thetruth.
[00:39:38] The government is doing to the people of Ukraine.This is a quote from the daily dot going to pull this up too. Thisis a a tweet here on Twitter and. Yeah. It's from the anonymous,that hacker group, you've probably heard of them before. Causethey've done a lot of nasty stuff over the years, but he says it'sbeen doing just absolutely amazing things for him.
[00:40:02] Let's see here. Can we hear this? Here we go. Ah, Igot to unmute it. Let's see. Where is my mute? There it is. So thisguy's name is Rodney. He is. D Jang, oh my dog. Get to Django mydog. And he's got a really great little testimonial there aboutthat. It works and his tweet has had 4,300 views and it's good.
[00:40:30] Again, another way around censorship now, Twitter, ofcourse could decide they're going to sensor and that could be aproblem too, but that's also why we now have alternatives toTwitter. And some of these other sites that are out there that aredoing a whole bunch of blocking really, they don't like you.
[00:40:51] And by the way, the reference to Telegraph wasfascinating because they are using. In order to get aroundcensorship. Again, many people are using it to to send informationabout what is really, truly happening in Ukraine. So a lot of stufffrom the beginning of the war here, visit me online. Craigpeterson.com.
[00:41:14] Get my newsletter and get the free up-to-datetrainings.
[00:41:20] They pass the infrastructure bill, which means nowit's time to figure out what is in the infrastructure bill. Andwe're going to talk about the technology that they decided to fundthe technology. That's going to win the game because it hasbillions of dollars of federal money behind it.
[00:41:36] This is disappointing bully it's normal, right?
[00:41:40] It's absolutely normal because the federal governmenthas always been one that picks winners and losers. If you're oldenough, you remember, of course, VHS. Tapes right too. Do youremember beta tapes? Beta max tapes. Beta max was really quite thestandard for professional production for the longest time, a bettertechnology, frankly, a lot better than VHS.
[00:42:06] Same. Thing's true with beta, but beta lost. And ofcourse we ended up with VHS tapes. That's an example oftechnologies that were backed by investors. And we've seen a lot ofthat. Look at what's happened with the Serono trial, again,technology backed by investors. And it turned out to not work andin quite a dramatic way, frankly.
[00:42:33] We've seen that again and again, and keep hitting mymic here and the problem that we really have, isn't so much thatinvestors get things wrong because they. I was talking with afriend of mine. Who's has been an angel investor and part of VCpartnerships for a long time. And he was saying, we're lucky if weget maybe one out of 20 times, we get.
[00:42:57] Now, these are professionals and my friend, he's atechnology guy. He and I contracted together at the same time overat digital equipment corporation. And he came to me for a lot ofadvice about business. Now, I look back and think my gosh, the wayhe did it. You can have all kinds of decisions in life.
[00:43:18] Some are going to bring you closer to family. Someare going to bring you more peace and joy and happiness, and someare going to give you very gray hair that you're going to lose veryquickly. And he chose the kind of the gray hair. But he was reallyclear about that. Cause I had said to him, what is a one-time outof 10 VCs make money.
[00:43:39] And that's when he corrected me. He said, no, it'sreally one out of 20, if they're lucky, because that doesn't evenhappen all of the time. Now think about him. He was working on thescuzzy subsystem, which is. Complicated topic, but basically theability for a computer to be able to talk to its hard desks.
[00:43:58] Okay. Let's just keep it simple. And I was working inthe kernel, which is the core of the operating system and wasrewriting kernel modules and routines. To work with a few differenttypes of features and functions. I was in very deep verycomplicated. He was in rather deep, rather complicated.
[00:44:19] There's always a battle by the way, between compilerpeople and kernel people as to who has the more complicated job,but he wasn't either. So he just a Colonel guy guess. So he wenton. He started a company. He got VC angel funding and VC funding.He made a card for your computer that you could plug in that wouldprovide not just scuzzy support, but he moved the file system outof the operating system onto the card.
[00:44:50] I that's something I had actually done a decadeearlier with the network moving it out. But anyways, that's adifferent story entirely. So many things I've done all my life thatI wish I'd been able to monetize. But anyways, w he doesn't, he'snot a slacker. Let me put it that way. When it comes to technologyand neither are his partners, and yet one time out of 20 and alongcomes the infrastructure.
[00:45:14] They call it the infrastructure, but it reallybothers me to call bills things that they're not the infrastructurebill that had. What was it? About five, 6% actually going toinfrastructure. It's like the Democrats under president, the lastpresident Obama they, he had this shovel-ready jobs, which ofcourse wasn't true.
[00:45:35] And most of the money didn't go to buildinginfrastructure. It just got worse. It's just crazy and we're notpaying attention. So I'm going to help you right now. Enoughranting and raving. The infrastructure bill contains money for somethings. We'll talk about a few of them here in a minute and alsohas new regulations.
[00:45:56] And one of those regulations that I've been talkingabout on the radio this week is this requirement to put killswitches in all new cars. That is really a big deal. Now a killswitch of course, is something that will stop the engine and it'llstop the car. That's the whole idea. And there's various types thathave been bantered bandied about including pulling the car over tothe side of the road.
[00:46:25] If the driver stops responding as a driver might havea heart attack, or maybe they fell asleep, maybe something happenedin that car should probably pull over and get out of traffic, turnon the flashers which then makes it a target. Apparently for someof these Teslas, we've seen articles about that in the new.
[00:46:44] Yeah, don't park on the side of the road. They, I wasin emergency medical for a long time. And one of the things I canpass along to that may save your life is if you have to pull over,do not stay in the car, do not stand in front of the. Andparticularly in the evening or at night because the flashing lightsand the car at the side of the road is a beacon for drunk driversto come and hit you as well as some of these autonomous vehicles,apparently just get out of the car.
[00:47:16] Behind the car off the road. Okay. Go off the roadbehind the car, not next to the car off the road, not in front ofthe car, off the road, behind the car. So if it does get hit, youare less likely to suffer severe damage yourself, but this killsswitch. That's part of this bill that was passed in sign, ofcourse, a hidden part requires all manufacturers to include theability.
[00:47:44] For police departments and potentially others. Andthis is where some of the problem comes in to be able to stop the.Now you might remember back in 98, there's a Saifai series calledthe X-Files. It was very cool series. And there's an episode calledkill switch about an artificial intelligence gone wild.
[00:48:07] And that, that is of course a while ago back whenmost people were still using dial up modem. But this was a tale oftechnology, run a muck, and it was warning about handing too muchof your life over to technology. Oh, that's one thing. But in thiscase, isn't it safer, right? Because somebody is whipping throughneighborhoods at 80 miles an hour in their car, trying to avoidpolice.
[00:48:37] Shouldn't have, please be able to stop that car andpull it. The problem is multifold frankly, and having this killswitch one is what constitutes law abiding. There's a great articlein motorists.com and it shows a picture of this down in NewZealand. Our car was pulled over. And the police found the trunkwas full of contraband.
[00:49:02] Now we've seen this before, right? And movies, Miamivice and others, where they pull over the car. It's got all thiscontraband in the trunk. It's cocaine and various other things. No.This isn't Auckland New Zealand and the trunk was full of Kentuckyfried chicken meat. They were running Kentucky fried chicken, justlike the Kennedys, running illegal booze back in the day. Yeah.That's how they made their millions. They were running Kentuckyfried chicken. Now this bill that was signed into law by presidentBiden states that this kills switch, which uses referred to as asafety device, must passively monitor the performance of a driverof a motor vehicle to accurately identify whether that driver maybe impaired.
[00:49:54] In other words, big brother will be constantlymonitoring how you drive. If you do something that the system hasbeen programmed to recognize as driver impairment or unsafe drivingyour car could just shut off, which could be incredibly dangerous.I want to point out this week too. There's another article I readabout Teslas and how Tesla had introduced last fall, a feature.
[00:50:23] So you could set how the car was going to drive. Doyou want to drive? Real cool, laid back fashion. Do you want thecar to drive an average way or do you want it to be aggressive?Just weave in and out of traffic a bit and tailgate and do all ofthose sorts of things and you could set it and there is a publicbacklash and Tesla got rid of it.
[00:50:42] It is back now. How do you tell if a driver's beingunsafe? When a car in its autonomous mode will do the same thingsthat a human drivers shouldn't be doing? Or what if you're haulingcontraband, Kentucky fried chicken? How is the driving going to bemeasured as impaired? Now I know in many states you have thesebreathalyzers that are court ordered, installed in cars.
[00:51:13] Okay, so that makes sense. Somebody has been drunkdriving many times. You don't want them drunk driving ever again,please. And thank you. But how about having that system in everycar? Because it fails. It doesn't work sometimes. And how about theback door? Because that's essentially what we're talking about.
[00:51:34] These cars are going to have a back door that allowssomeone named government authorities to access it whenever theywant. Would they need a warrant to do it? Probably not. Even ashackers could access the back door and shut down your vehicle,think about lad having a kill switch that would kill all of thecars and trucks in the United States.
[00:52:02] Right? There are so many potential problems here andthey haven't been thought about. Oh, obviously it's government, butwe're going to talk or we'd get back about the investment that arepart of this multi-trillion dollar bill that you and your kids andgrandkids are paying for.
[00:52:23] We know they snuck a backdoor kill, switch into allcars manufactured after 2026 into this infrastructure belt. Whatelse is in there? That's going to affect technology. That's whatwe're going to talk about right now.
[00:52:38] We know about this now. After it passed, finally,people had a chance to read it because this provision on the killswitch was not debated in the house.
[00:52:50] It was not debated in this. Just like they've beendoing was so many other things for so long now they just bundlethem all together in a bill. They gave it a cute little cuddlytitle, and then they go ahead and put whatever it is they want intoit. These are these omnibus bills that they should have gotten ridof decades ago.
[00:53:16] It is absolutely crazy to me. I just. Get it. Why arewe putting up with this? So now the next step here is theinvestments that are being made. Now I'm going to type in rightnow, how successful are angel investments? Okay. So here we go.Bunch of ads for angel investing says you can have an averagereturn of 1.1 X cap.
[00:53:48] All right. And it goes on and on. This is a companycalled core associates. The success rate of angel investors. Thisis from Investopedia, the effective internal rate out return for asuccessful portfolio for angel investors is approximately 22%. Now,remember that over. So that's pretty amazing. Those numbers aremuch higher than what my friends said that they can expectabsolutely much, much.
[00:54:19] But I can tell you one thing for sure. Governmentquote, investments, end quote, rarely ever actually pay out becauseyou've got political motivations in there. It's one thing to be asmart technology guy investing in technology. But how about thosepeople in Congress? That aren't smart technology guys.
[00:54:44] How about the doctors in Congress? Look at whatSenator Paul ran. Paul has been saying he is a doctor and what he'sbeen saying about the whole COVID thing and the way the governmenthas handled it. We are really going down the wrong road to herebecause government. Taking the money from us at the point of agun.
[00:55:06] Try not paying your taxes and see what happens rarelyends up. Okay. So the us Congress passed November six. Biden'strillion. Plus infrastructure bill that includes 65 billion ofinvestments in the power grid to accommodate rising, renewableenergy capacity and demonstration clean tech project. So what'sthat one about?
[00:55:32] That particular one is because our grid cannot handlesolar and also the windmill power. The rates, we would need to haveit, our grid set up so that you have a few centralized powerstations, and then that power is distributed to the area. It's notset up for having tens of thousands of power stations.
[00:55:56] So there you go, president Biden, put money into tryand figure out well, Hey, how do we accomplish? How do weaccommodate them? Noma, Germany has done. Is they've gone ahead andthey're using a massive lake as a heat sink to get rid of the extraelectricity that's being generated. When it comes to a regularpower plant, you can turn it up.
[00:56:21] You can turn it down the same. Thing's true for everytype of power plant, whether it's powered by water or nuclear orcold, you can turn it up. But when it comes to wind and solar youcan't turn it down. If it's a nice sunny day, you're not going tobe able to turn that power down. It's still coming out.
[00:56:40] You got to do something with it. You can cut it. Openthe circuit. But the power companies that run the grid don't havethat kind of fine grain control over the electricity that you'regenerating in your house or in your business. There's so manyproblems that start to open up here. So they're spending $65billion.
[00:57:02] That is a lot of money to figure this out. Okay.Personally, I'd rather see the private sector do it because they'regoing to have a better chance of coming up with something that'sreally going to work next part here. Okay. And by the way, Colin itor trillion dollar plus is being favorable because they played allkinds of gimmicks with this money.
[00:57:25] Just, I just found out. In fact, I think it was acouple of weeks ago, June. Do you remember. President Biden movedall of the college loans from private sources into the white house.Do you remember that? So the white house is controlling all collegeloans at the time I thought, okay, it's just them paying back theunions, the teachers unions, right?
[00:57:49] Because it also included provisions that you cannothave be bankrupt and get rid of your college. Th that's just mindboggling to me, but as it turns out what he was doing. Okay. All ofthat's true. But what he was actually doing is saying, oh, there'sover a trillion dollars in college loans. So we're going to movethem into the white house and call those assets to offset all ofthe money we're spending.
[00:58:19] You see what we're talking about here? It's just not.Electric vehicles, clean energy, public transit are all part ofthis trillion dollar plus legislation. It's got $550 billion, ahalf, a trillion dollars to fund advancements in public transit,clean energy electric vehicles, roads, and bridges. Okay. It'salways electric.
[00:58:48] Really? The right winner here is electric. The betamax that should have won out over VHS. How about hydrogen? Howabout some other way? How about natural gas or LP gas? What we'llnever know because some of that is not going to get funding.However, there is going to be some funding. For nucleardevelopment?
[00:59:12] No, I've talked a lot about this on the radio before,but the bottom line is nuclear is the only green energy that we canreally get. And I can hear some people saying, oh, you're not surenot to know. Look at the current generations of nuclear power. Now,unfortunately, the regulations around nuclear power were writtenwhat, 70, 60 years ago, right?
[00:59:38] When nuclear power was nasty stuff, it came out ofthe projects that we had in world war II to build nuclear bomb. Nowthese six generation nuclear power plants are as clean as can be.They only need to be refueled every 10 to 20 years, and they'resmall enough to fit into a small building smaller than your averagehome.
[01:00:02] And you can put one of these in the neighborhood in asmall town, and that will power the whole. Thing. Okay. So we'realready getting 27%, according to president Biden of our power fromthese decades, old nuclear and hydro power facilities, they've got21 and a half billion dollars in this for clean energydemonstrations and research hubs focused on next generationtechnologies, helping to get us to that net zero by 2050 thatthey're looking at.
[01:00:35] To get to, so this will be interesting because therethey've got 8 billion earmarked for hydrogen and carbon capture.Guess what's going to get more, yeah. Carbon capture, direct aircapture, and we don't know what's going to happen with this. We'returning cow, carbon into stone, basically with some of these plansand experiments are underway.
[01:00:56] So what happened. When we need that carbon again. But8 billion is earmarked for hydrogen and carbon capture directcapture, 10 billion, two and a half billion earmarked for advancednuclear. So I'm happy with that. Not that they're spending themoney, not at all, but that they're actually putting it intosomething that might make a difference.
[01:01:22] And hydrogen funding in this, by the way, it lookslike it's a big win for oil and the whole oil industry stickaround.
[01:01:31] You've heard of this shortage of Silicon, ofsemiconductors CPU's et cetera. I don't know if you tried to buy acomputer lately, order a computer, et cetera, but there is anotherpart of the computer that's really hard to get. And that's whatwe're going to talk about.
[01:01:56] CPU is the central processing unit in yourcomputer.
[01:02:01] And that nowadays might actually not just be on achip by itself, back in the day. I'm thinking about the, some ofthe first microchips microcomputers I worked with such as the 65 02, that original. Apple chip that they use great little chip, bythe way, he was just so clever how they got around some of theproblems eight-bit problems or the day that computer with its CPUwas a standalone CPU.
[01:02:30] That in other words, the CPU only did CPU thinks, itwent out and grabbed stuff from memory and then did the computingand then. Push the results back to memory. Just simplifying itthere today. You look at a CPU like what apple is putting intotheir iPhones and the iPads, and particularly their desktops with ,the M family, really whole family of chips.
[01:02:56] It is no longer just a CPU on that chip. That chiphas all of them. It has, of course, all of the memory controllerson it, the processors, it has low power processors. It has highpower processors and it has GPU's that's what I want to talk aboutright now are the GPU's cause in the apple case, you. One of theseM series computers and your stuck with what you buy, which is whyyou should always be buying the biggest, best just computer you canso that it will last you longer.
[01:03:32] And I'm not talking about the fact of that study thatsaid your average laptop, nowadays windows, laptop is going to lastabout seven months. I'm talking about the it's going to last, notbecause it breaks down or doesn't break down, but it's going tolast because it has enough memory to handle future operatingsystems, et cetera.
[01:03:53] Now we've got a problem today with TPMS. These aretrusted platform modules and apple has actually been usingsomething very similar to that for a long time. TPMS are in thewindow's case, very simplistic and don't actually provide very muchsecurity. They're basically going to help prevent someone puttingsome malicious code into the boot blocks on your computer.
[01:04:23] So it's going to do some good, but it's not going todo a lot of good and windows. Now, Microsoft is requiring prettymuch TPMS for windows either. Across the board. Now there's someways around it sometimes depending on what you're doing, how you'redoing it, but as a whole, yeah. You gotta have that TPM in orderfor things to work for you and even installed windows 11.
[01:04:50] That's a good step, frankly that they made apple ismany steps ahead of Microsoft in this case, mainly because they canmake their own hardware. Microsoft can't. So when you buy aMicrosoft computer inside, it's going to have what we're stillcalling a CPU, but it's much more than that.
[01:05:11] Nowadays their CPU might be from Intel. It might befrom AMD. Those are the two most likely Microsoft with theirsurface tablets does support similar chips to what apple is making.So you don't have to use an Intel type of chip in order to runwindows anymore, depending on the hardware you're using.
[01:05:32] But as part of these chips, you have to move graphicsaround. So the modern chips, like the Intel chips and AMD chipshave some GPU capabilities built into. But in most cases, you'regoing to add a GPU card to your machine. So what is this GPU? Whatare we talking about here? A GPU is a really interesting piece ofhardware because it is designed specifically to move.
[01:06:05] Bits of information around very efficiently versus aCPU, which is designed to do mathematics on words of data. So inother words, 64 bits at a time. So if you're moving stuff aroundthe memory buses on the CPU, et cetera, are optimized for maybe 128bits of data all at once. So why would you want something that onlyhandles.
[01:06:33] A bit at a time. Of course it can do more than that,but we're keeping things simple. You want that because it'sefficient at it. And if you think about the graphics processingunit, as the thing that handles the graphics, and you look at ascreen, that screen is composed of most likely millions of dots,even on our little smartphone device.
[01:06:55] Millions of dots. And so you've got to flip thosedots around. Sometimes you need to move them as something most, orthe most efficient way. For instance, to show a video is not toupdate that whole screen, because if you look at a screen withvideo, most of that screen, isn't moving nothing. Tap. What youwant to update is just the parts that are moving and that's wherecompression comes into place.
[01:07:21] And also where decompression comes into play. So allof this stuff that is part of moving things around on your screen,even if you're dragging a window around on your display, that ismost optimally handled by the graphics processing unit, the. SoApple's putting their memory on chip. It's putting the GPU's, CPU'sthe high power, low power.
[01:07:45] CPU's everything it can. And then all the memorymanagement and stuff on one chip. And that gives some hugeadvantages because when you're talking about the speeds that we'reusing today the less space that electrons have to travel the fasterit will be. I know you think about that for a minute, right?
[01:08:03] You turn on a light switch and lights are oninstantly. In reality, it takes a little bit because the electronshave to, first of all, get to the light and then they have tosomehow excite something in the light in order to make the light.But electrons, distance traveled matters in. So why are we havingsuch a huge shortage of GPU's while it has to do with their abilityto mine, crypto current?
[01:08:34] Now the best way to mine. Cryptocurrency is usingspecially made and designed hardware that is designed for that oneparticular cryptocurrency. So it makes sense to you. That's thebest way to do. But in most cases you don't have that speciallydesigned hardware. And in many cases, that hardware is only reallyviable for a few months, but people are still buying GPUspecifically to mine, cryptocurrencies, by the way.
[01:09:09] It's usually cheaper to buy cryptocurrencies and tomine them because the average electric bill in the United Statesmakes it so that it is impossible to mine. These cryptocurrencieslike Bitcoin effectively enough. So the electricity is cheaper thanthe pit coins worth. So think about that. If a Bitcoin is worth$50,000, Frank.
[01:09:34] The electricity to mine. Another Bitcoin is more thanlikely going to cost you more than 50 grand and take a long time.So people are still buying GPU's these high-end GPU's, they'reusing them to build machines that have a bunch of these cards inthem. And that is causing shortages for you and me who might wantto make videos efficiently or who might want to do just.
[01:10:01] Computing and buy a high-end computer. So it's goodfor you for the next five to 10 years. Oh, and Radian, who makessome of these high-end GPU's just came out with one that isspecifically designed to be bad at mining cryptocurrency. So whoknows? Maybe there is a little bit of hope here. You can visit meonline.
[01:10:23] I'd appreciate it. If you would, Craig peterson.com,you'll find all kinds of great information there. And if you signup, I'm going to send you absolutely free. My three most popular,special reports, including. The one-on passwords, Craigpeterson.com. Visit me online and stick around because we'll beright back.
[01:10:49] There are a lot of programs claiming that they aresecure. That's what we're going to talk about right now for securecommunications. What about telegram? What about signal? What aboutWhatsApp and WhatsApp? You remember started 20, 21 with a realblackout.
[01:11:05] Signal is probably the best software that you can usethe best app. They've got a desktop version as well in order tokeep your communications safe. And that's what you want to do. Youdon't want. People listening in. You don't want people spying onyou. You just want to have a conversation.
[01:11:27] And there's many things that you'd say in a privateconversation that you would not say, if you were sitting here onthe radio or standing on the top of a building with a thousandpeople below you, private conversations are meant to be. Whatsignal is doing to play with fire is they are talking about tryingto pull in cryptocurrency payments into part of signals,platinum.
[01:11:55] It all started with something called mobile callingand signals CEO. And his name is mark C Marlin spike. We've talkedto him about him a few times, but he was an advisor to the mobilecoin, current cryptocurrency. And it's been built on this stellarblockchains designed to use a view, be used to make anonymouspayments that are basically the same mistakes.
[01:12:20] So it's designed to hide everything from ha fromevery one. That's the whole idea behind mobile coin. So the problemis if you start to integrate advertising systems into supposedlysecure communication channels, what's going to have. If you startto take things like a cryptocurrency and put it into a securecommunications channel, then what's going to happen.
[01:12:48] You can bet that what's going to happen isgovernments are going to step in saying, Hey, wait a minute. Nowyou can have money flowing. I remember buying a car. And this wasback in I think the early eighties and I went to the bank and I gota loan from the bank in order to buy the car. And they gave meeight, $1,000 bills.
[01:13:11] Cause I was going down to the auction car auction andI was going to buy a car and I set myself an $8,000. So the ideawas like buy the car and I come back, I pay them back thedifference, and then they write the rest stop as alone, man.Weren't those the days, right? When a banker knew you, the bankermade decisions on things like an $8,000 loan, I don't know.
[01:13:37] What would that be worth in today's money? 10,020probably goes to the $15,000 just based on my word. And I walkedout of there with thousand dollar bills and. I also had $500 bills.And back then, you used them to pay bills and of course they'reworth more today than they were then. Let me put it the other wayis actually worth less, right?
[01:14:03] Because of the, in crazy amounts of inflation thatwe've had. But the bottom line is you could have. Get thousanddollar bills and put eight of them in your pocket. So it doesn'tlook like you're walking around with a huge water cash thatsomeone's going to steal from you. And then the government decidedthat, oh my gosh, that's terrible.
[01:14:25] Oh no. Wow. Drug dealers might be using thosethousand dollar bills. Oh, yeah, this is true. They might be usingthem and we all want to start off, stop the sale of illegal illicitdrugs. That makes sense. But the war on drugs, we're not going toget into that has been an abject failure and it has resulted inthings like the fiscal or w you're not even charged criminally orcivilly, and they seize the money.
[01:14:55] You. So they got rid of thousand dollar bills becauseof course they were only used by drug dealers and people like me,they got rid of $500 bills because of course it was still the drugdealers. And to me who were using them now, the biggestdenomination that you can get is a hundred dollar bill.
[01:15:14] Although the treasury is talking about making mintinga 1000, excuse me. $1 trillion coin that they would use in order tomake payments, right? Yeah. So that, that balances their budget.Cause yeah, they just printed a trillion dollar coin. Anyhow. Theproblem is that the government wants its fingers in everytransaction, whether or not there are drug dealers involved andthat is causing us nothing but headaches and heartaches, frankly,it's a real.
[01:15:49] Problem. So when you get Marlin spike, tallyingpeople, that signal is going to include a cryptocurrency calledmobile calling that is designed to be absolutely private. That'swhen they government starts freaking. China already has acryptocurrency. In fact, they've been trying to peddle theircryptocurrency for use by governments around the world to trade foroil.
[01:16:21] Remember the United States time was when our currencywas supposed to be the standard. Remember that the standard for.Doing transactions worldwide crypto type transactions is whereChina wants to delete it. And what they're trying to do when theylead it over there is get the U S dollar out of the way.
[01:16:43] He can't say as I blame them lately, but they havebeen testing it already here. This coin, mobile coincryptocurrency. What do you do now, if you're trying to have aprivate conversation, I started out by mentioning telegram,WhatsApp and signal. Now we just talked about the biggest problemwith signal right now.
[01:17:06] We'll talk about it. Security in just a minute. Let'stalk about WhatsApp. WhatsApp's biggest problem is that it wasbought by Facebook. Should they have been allowed to buy them? Itdepends on how much of a free market person you are, should thegovernment have stepped in and said, no, you can't do that becausefrankly, WhatsApp was a competitor to Facebook and Facebook justbought them because they have so much cash.
[01:17:28] So WhatsApp's problem is Facebook. And remember lastyear, January, 2021, I think it was. Facebook said from now on, weare going to be inserting ads into your WhatsApp communications.Yeah. That kind of got people a little upset for very good reason.How about telegram? Telegram is not secure. It has never beensecure.
[01:17:55] And a lot of people switched over to telegram becauseof what happened with WhatsApp and Facebook saying we are going tobe putting ads into your WhatsApp channel. So tens of millions ofusers switched to Della gram. Yeah, it was a nightmare for WhatsApplast year, but frankly, the, it changed. WhatsApp changed Facebookbacked off because some people were upset, but they're ultimatelygoing to go that direction.
[01:18:26] That's who Facebook is, they make their money off ofus. Now signal is even more secure than WhatsApp. Telegram is notsecure at all. Okay. So forget about it. Don't use telegram.They've got this cloud-based architecture. That's truly, it's aserious risk when compared to end default encryption, that's usedby signal.
[01:18:48] Why? So right off telegram, if you want a secureprivate conversation, but one tap and signal both have end to enddefault encryption. So why would I say that signal is more securethan WhatsApp? The bottom line is that WhatsApp keeps some of yourdata in. Okay. And that's where the problem really comes in withsignal.
[01:19:17] Everything is encrypted. Everything is obfuscated.Okay. Telegram, you can delete messages, chats, call histories,groups, any time that you create them in afterwards deleted items,completely disappear for all participants without our trace. There,there's just all kinds of problems, but now I'm concerned aboutsignal.
[01:19:36] That signal has been doing a lot of stuff in order tokeep the bad guys and snoops out of their streams. And thatincludes even putting in codes that are known to crash some of thedevices, the criminals and law enforcement, even you. Build itright into signal, which I thought was just hilarious becausethere's this tool that I'm referring to terminate Israeli companyis using some open source software that they have not patched inyears solely.
[01:20:10] It's it's absolutely fun. So keep all of that inmind. In reality signal is. Everything it possibly can to keep yourdata safe. I am concerned about the fact that they're going afterthis coin mobile thing, trying to integrate it. I can see whythey'd try and do that. Facebook has released its owncryptocurrency last year.
[01:20:36] I didn't really go anywhere. They've relabeled it acouple of times, and Facebook wants to become your payment centersas well. So you can use Facebook messages in order to send moneyand potentially use WhatsApp as well. Apple, by the way, is usingencryption end to end for I message. But there is some concernabout iron message particularly lately because apple has been usingits own backdoor keys for some of the data that you store.
[01:21:10] And I'm a little unclear as to how I message fitsinto that whole. But WhatsApp is free. Signal is free. Telegram isfree, but it's becoming clear the price you need to pay for itbecause Facebook basically broke WhatsApp. And because of thatradical change and you can consider it to come out further.
[01:21:36] And we know that Telegraph is just not there andhopefully signal's going to smarten up here and not try and get there federal regulators involved because of monetary transactions.Although, technically it's not money, right? It's a cryptocurrency.Should you stop using WhatsApp? The short answer's probably, no, Ido use it with one of my mastermind groups.
[01:22:01] Nothing's really changed after the pushback frompeople who've been using it. That's the short app answer, but yoursignal whenever you can, it just makes. Hey, thanks for joining metoday. Spend a little time over your weekend and I'd invite you toalso go online. Go to Craig peterson.com. Make sure you sign up forthe newsletter.
[01:22:24] I've got a special report on passwords this week.
