[03-14-2017] WTAG – Craig Peterson

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Transcript

WTAG_2017-03-14_Jim-Has-Three-Hackable-Televisions

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 03/14/2017

Jim Has Three Hackable Televisions – What the CIA Hack Means

Craig Peterson: In the midst of blizzard, I spoke with Jim Polito. We talked a lot about what is happening today with the CIA, with the leaks and our devices. Turns out Jim has a bunch of devices that were named right in that Wikileaks document. We’re talking about the CIA. How about you?

Jim Polito: Alright, he would never say coz he’s not that kind of guy. You know, like the people that would say, I told you so. Basically, what Craig Peterson has been telling us for years. The director of the FBI confirmed the other day. And that is you don’t have any privacy. None. And everything is watching you. I don’t know if the microwave is watching you. But Kellyanne Conway said unless of course it’s hooked up to your Wi-Fi. But if it’s hooked up, your Wi-Fi is watching you. Joining us now, our Tech Talk guru, Craig Peterson. Good morning Sir.

Craig: Hey good morning. You know out of the Consumer Electronics Show, they had microwaves and ovens that were hooked up to your Wi-Fi.

Jim: What is it like? Now you have a name for all of these, what is it like the internet of the other… or what’s the?

Craig: The internet of broken things. It’s just a treasure trove for our spy agencies.

Jim: Yeah.

Craig: Everything broken and hacked.

Jim: So, I know. You started talking about this with us. Well you were with Paul Wescott after I left. And then we inherited you and obviously, we would be foolish to get rid of you so we kept you on. And since day one, you’ve been saying this kind of stuff. And James Comey now look, we put politics aside and what do you believe in or what you think of him. But he came right out and said, there’s no such thing as privacy. You have no privacy.

Craig: Absolutely. Yeah. It’s crazy, isn’t it? You know the government wants to monitor everyone. And, you know, there’s people who say well they’re doing it just because they want control. Others are saying they’re doing it to keep us safe. And it’s probably somewhere in the middle. But they never have it so easy before. Because now we’ve got… Jim, for years, for decades I have complained about the lack of professional software developers. That Microsoft has destroyed the software development world because everything’s drag and drop. You don’t understand anymore how the network layers are working. How they’re interacting? How the operating system is interacting with this piece of hardware? How the Windows interface interacts? You know there is an incredible amount of complexity in a computer. But if you want to do is make a piece of software. Now, you drag a component that says ok. I need to communicate on the networks, so I drag that over here. I need to have a little user interface button so I drag that over here. I draw my buttons and I’m done, right? With a little bit of extra glue code in the middle. When you’re doing that with these devices now, and you’re not a professional programmer, you’ve been designing lightbulbs for the last hundred years, right?

Jim: Yup.

Craig: You don’t understand the implications of what you’re doing and how you’re designing that. And then let’s top it off. When was the last time you updated the firmware in your lightbulb.

Jim: Right.

Craig: Your refrigerator. Yeah, exactly. You know, people just don’t do it. It’s hard enough to do it in your Google android device. Because many of these devices don’t have upgrades available for them. So now we’re at a point where we have all kinds of non-security professional, non-network security professional people designing everything because everything, I don’t know if you saw this announcement here this week, but Levi’s is coming out with a jacket. It’ll be out this fall. Available in the stores. The jacket has built in Bluetooth.

Jim: Yeah.

Craig: And has 16, I think it is, little fibers on the arm, that you can touch in different ways and it will interact with you to tell you the time, the weather, a number of other things. That’s the jacket. So when everything’s connected to the internet, and it’s your clothing, which I’ve been predicting for years now, your clothing is doing it.

Jim: It’s hackable. Yeah.

Craig: It’s hackable, right? So where are we gonna end up at? So when we’ve got FBI director James Comey saying there is no such thing as absolute privacy in America, he’s absolutely right. Vizio TVs, did you hear about those things? They were watching people. They were sending it up.

Jim: Craig. We have, Mrs. Polito and I, have 3 Vizio TVs. Three!

Craig: Yeah. And now, Samsung got accused of this Vizio and said yeah, yeah we did it and paid the fine, right? They were collecting everything they possibly could. TVs are watching us, looking at our faces to try and determine who’s in the room? Who’s watching what? When are you paying attention to the TV versus your phone? Because we are products now.

Jim: We are. Yeah.

Craig: The FBI says hey this is great, Vizio. They’re sending everything back to Korea. Let’s intercept it and then we’ll know who, where, when they are.

Jim: Wow.

Craig: It’s like Tom Cruise walking past the sign in a store that scans his face, knows who he is, and gives them a grinning. You know, Minority Report. It how that bad it’s gotten Jim. And it’s not gonna get better, not for a very long time. This internet thing is entirely broken. It’s concerning to me to a degree you can’t possibly imagine. We’re driving a car down the highway at full speed. There is one light on the dashboard that’s the entire amount of information we have. We can’t even see out the window. And yet we think we’re gonna be just fine. I don’t like it.

Jim: Craig, we don’t have a lot of time coz we’re obviously, as you know we’re dealing with Stella today. But listen. Quickly. Apple says that they’re fixing the security holes revealed by Wikileaks. Are they really?

Craig: If you’ve applied the patches that Apple released over the last little while. In other words, you do the upgrades.

Jim: Yup.

Craig: You already have a bunch of these holes already fixed. Google’s saying the same thing. Hey listen, just make sure you apply the patches. Now in the Apple community most people do apply them. They’re easy to apply. They’re available for phones who are years old. Google community not so much. But you can bet everybody’s gonna be fixing these as they’re released. Remember, we got less than 1% of all of the documents released so far.

Jim: I know.

Craig: What else is in there? I don’t know.

Jim: Alright. Craig, if people text my name to this number…

Craig: 855-385-5553.

Jim: You’ll know these things before everyone else. And by the way, you would have known years ago that what James Comey said the other day, was completely true. You would’ve known it already. Standard data and text rates apply. Craig, thanks so much. I appreciate your time.

Craig: Thanks Jim. Thanks for having me on.

Jim: Alrighty.

Craig: Make sure you join me every day. You can find the subscription to iTunes right there at http://CraigPeterson.com/itunes. And you can search for me, I’m on Soundcloud and also on TuneIn. A couple of great apps out there. We’re working on iHeart. We’ll be there believe me and we’ll be back a little bit later on today with another TechSanity check daily. Take care. Craig Peterson, signing out.

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Show Notes

In the age of “Internet of Broken Things”, we can never know how safe is “safe” anymore. As there is no longer a sense of privacy, which is what we used to know, everyone is watching us even from our smart homes.

Now, if our smart devices are hackable, and CIA or NSA is watching, then what happens with all those information out on WikiLeaks?

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