[12-21-16] The WGAN Morning News

 

Joined Ken and Matt to discuss more of what “Doxxing” is all about, and how this can work against you. With the holidays just a few days away, I have also shared some tips on how to stay safe while enjoying with your family.

Get Craig’s recommended gift list when you visit craigpeterson.com/shopping.

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WGAN – 122116

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

Airing Date: December 21, 2016

Matt Gagnon: 7:38 at the WGAN morning news and every Wednesday at 7:38 we are joined by Craig Peterson. He’s our 
tech guru who’s here to talk about all things technology. Craig, how are you this morning?

Craig Peterson: I got a bit of a… I don’t know what this is… a cold?

Matt: Ah, we all have it.

Ken Altshuler: It’s a flu-head cold combination of the two.

Craig: Yeah.

Ken: Whatever it is we’re all gonna die…

Matt: It is something of a minor miracle that Ken and I both made it through the morning.

Ken: At the same time. And we’re both here with head colds.

Matt: Seriously. And I’ve been saved by a gigantic Mocha Dunkaccino from Dunkin Donuts.

Ken: And I say Craig is you can’t catch it than we have to through the microphone.

Matt: That we know of.

Craig: I don’t know. Sheesh. Has that been proven?

Matt: Well, we don’t have any sort of scientific basis.

Ken: No, but I’m guessing.

Matt: But I hear that the science is settled on.

Craig: The Russians, did they figure it out?

Matt: They might have.

Craig, before we get to the actual tech topics here, we are now taking suggestions for theme music for the show.

Craig: Right.

Matt: We need a good, you know, 10-second intro. Guitar would be nice, but who cares really? Just a good 10-second intro with no lyrics. Got any suggestions?

Craig: Well, of course, you know that’s called an earworm. Correct?

Matt and Ken: An earworm.

Craig: That’s something that gets in your ear and kinda is catchy and it kinda sticks with you.

Ken: And so it’s torture…

Matt: I was gonna say… that sounds like…

Craig: No, no. It’s a real term. And it’s used in marketing.

Matt: Well do you have any earworms for us?

Ken: Give it some thought Craig. And if you have any earworms for us, January 2nd we need a new theme song.

Craig: New theme. What’s the prize? How much do I win?

Ken: You win our total gratitude?

Matt: You win the gratification of hearing that theme song every time you come on.

Ken: And when you come to Maine you will get your Lobster House huh.

Craig: Ooh. That would be cool.

Ken: And by the way if you want a earth… what’s it called? Worm? Earworm, for your segment, we’ll also do an earworm for that.

Matt: Oh that’s right. We can do a special earworm.

Ken: Exactly.

Craig: That’s true. Yeah. Well, we’ll get busy over the holidays.

Ken: Speaking about getting busy, can you tell us what doxing is? And why we should be concerned about that?

Craig: My God. Doxing is the latest and greatest in what’s the bad guys are doing. It’s been around for a long time. If the police department were trying to figure out something about you, were you involved in a crime, they’d wanna know who you associated with? Where do you hang out? And things… So since about the 90s, the police had been going online to find out about you and what’s up. Right? And we know what the NSA has been doing which is just kinda grab and everything, right? From everybody. Doxing is now this practice… boy we have to be so careful this time of the year. But, were the bad guys are going after you and me and our business contacts for the most part. So they’ll go online and they’ll find that Ken is working for this incredible law firm and Matt is running all of the political parties in the state of Maine, right? And so they’ll go to your websites and they’ll find out, ok so… here is the company’s website. Here’s the officers in the company. Hey, I see Matt went to Harvard and Ken went to Maine State College. And find out other information about you guys. And then they’ll send like a request over on our favorite site Face book and say, hey, you know, we went to Harvard together. You know, we haven’t talked in years and wanted to reconnect. And most people are going to accept that friend request or you know, Maine State College are gonna accept that request, whatever it is. Now they have access to all kinds of information about you. So, they’re gonna sit there and gonna watch you for a little bit. And they’re going to try and get into your email accounts. And here’s how they’re gonna do that. They’re gonna say, Oh, you have a Yahoo! email account. Maybe. Here, let’s find out. Okay, yeah. Looks like you do. By searching through all your history. They’re gonna call Yahoo! and say hey, this is Ken. And you know, I lost my password and they’ll ask some questions, right? Some security questions. And guess where the answers to those questions are likely to be. In your Facebook history, right?

Matt: Uh huh.

Craig: So they’ll say well what school did you go to? What was the name of your dog? Various questions that they might have asked you. So now they get your access to your email account. Once they got access to your email account and they know who the CFO is, they’d had go ahead and send off an email to the CFO saying hey, this is Ken. I’m on vacation up at Niagara Falls. Because they got that information from your Facebook. We have a new supplier and that new supplier hasn’t been paid here for 2 months and we’re gonna lose them. I need you to wire 42 million dollars to this account. And guess what? It’s happening. Someone wired $42 million to the bad guys out of the country. The money was gone. Now, that’s a high end amount but they’ve been hitting companies up for $50,000 right, left, and center. And it’s shocking what they’re doing. That’s what doxing is. It’s documenting someone’s life. It’s figuring out where they are, what they’re doing and how to get into their accounts. And by the way, if they got into your email account, which they’re doing quite frequently, they can now go to the next step and go to Bank of America because you’re gonna be getting notices in our email account, right? First thing they do is search for bank. And it it’ll show who you’re with. TD Bank, whatever it may be. And then they’re going to go to Bank of America, play the same trick, get into your bank account, and in 90 seconds, all of your money will be wired overseas. That’s how fast this stuff happens.

Matt: Wow.

Craig: And vacation time, you know, our guards are down. We’re posting pictures or friending everybody we can. And the bad guys are taking advantage of it. This is going to be the big hack of 2017.

Matt: We’re talking to Craig Peterson our tech guru who’s joining us to talk to us about all thing technology. Craig, I was a bit negligent in my Christmas shopping duties and just basically started doing my share of it yesterday. And guess what, I finished it yesterday because that’s how good I am. Thank you online shopping. So let me ask you a question. In 3 or 4 days, am I going to see a drone appear at my house, now that I just shopped on Amazon for literally everything that I bought? Or is that just somewhere else?

Craig: This is a big deal. This was over the UK and Amazon has got all the systems in place now for drone deliveries and over there in the UK. And so they actually made their first delivery of… it was a popcorn. It was a salted sweet pepper popcorn. I don’t get it. It doesn’t sound very good to me. But anyways. It was delivered by a drone. That is their goal here and they are going to accomplish that within 5 years. If you’re in the major metropolitan area that they’ll be delivering via drone. I don’t know here in Maine how quickly they’ll be delivering stuff. If they’ll even start for another 10 years. But this is gonna change everything, right? We talked about the problems President Obama had with jobs and wow, the next few presidents. The lower end jobs, delivery driver jobs, taxis, truck drivers, they’re all gonna be gone within 20 years. And the majority of them will be gone within 10. And this type of drone delivery that you had just mentioned, Matt, that type of delivery is going to be one of the things that’s gonna make a huge impact. We’re gonna get our stuff faster. It’s gonna be cheaper to deliver to us.

Matt: Are people gonna be shooting these things down though.

Ken: I am.

Matt: I know, I’m gonna sit there with a net. Just throw it at these drones to make sure I get all these stuff. Is that a serious concern with it though? Is the possible interceptions of these things really?

Craig: Well it is a concern coz it could bring it down. They fly high enough that it’s hard to get them, right? To bring them down. Some people are gonna try to shoot them down. The most effective way is to use a net. You can make a drone catcher pretty easily with PVC pipe and a compressor in order to bring down those drones. So they’re concerned about that side of it but I think ultimately, these drones aren’t spying on you. They don’t come and hover outside your bathroom window. So, Amazon thinking that people for the most part are gonna leave them alone. And even with some losses they will be ahead of the game. So we’ll see. I don’t know, you guys. I wouldn’t mind having a drone delivery.

Matt: Oh I wouldn’t care at all…

Ken: Craig, I think it’s kinda cool but I have to tell you, UPS is kinda good at what they do. I mean what’s the advantage other than the coolness factor, of a drone bringing you a package than Federal Express or UPS?

Craig: Well right now it is cheaper for UPS or FedEx to deliver your packages and this is gonna be a game of who can do it more efficiently and cheaper ultimately. So, if UPS and FedEx can continue to bring down their pricing, you can be sure the drones will continue to get cheaper and cheaper to do. So that’s where they’re looking at. If you buy something, there’s something, if you’re in sales you’ll know this. It’s called buyer’s remorse. Someone buys something and usua;;y within a day they’ve got serious buyer’s remorse.

Matt: You’re talking about my wife, yeah.

Craig: And it starts within an hour most of the time. If you buy it on Amazon and you don’t see it right away, Amazon’s getting a high cancellation rate. In other words, you buy it. You can go in and before it ships. You know even with one click it doesn’t ship right away. It waits half an hour or more before it even tries to start shipping because of buyer’s remorse. So they’re thinking also, hey if we can get that product to you within an hour, we’re gonna have far fewer buyer’s remorse problems with returns and cancellations. So, I think it makes a lot of sense for them and it’s gonna save them money and it’s gonna get some materials into the hands of people that want them a lot quicker. And it’s gonna get cheaper too. It’s too expensive today still but ultimately when this thing rolls out they’ll have the price back under control.

Ken: I don’t mean to be really naïve, but I just, I mean how many drones are gonna be flying around or what? How will they miss the trees?

Matt: Well if it works, like, a lot. Right? Isn’t that the kind of trick is that they will have a lot of these drones kinda flyin around?

Ken: All over, I mean you see drones in the sky all over the place.

Matt: You go to the suburbs in Ohio somewhere and you see like 50 of them above houses.

Craig: Have you noticed, you guys might not have noticed, but Amazon has set up these pick up boxes across the country. And there’s a couple down too in south of Mass. In fact, quite a few. But right south of Maine, you have to go through New Hampshire first. But the whole idea here is they have distribution centers all over the country. Now they’re setting up these pick up boxes so you can tell Amazon, instead of shipping it to me, I wanna pick it up at the pickup box in 2 hours or something. They will change these pickup boxes to be drone launch sites. So they’ll be all over the place. And yeah, you’re both right. There’ll be thousands of these things in the air. But they’ll be following kinda preset paths. They’re already good in avoiding trees and power lines and other things. So, they’ll get better. There’s a lot of technical problems they still have.

Matt: Self-driving cars. Drones in the air. We’re living in Minority Report right now, aren’t we?

Craig: How about trucks? You that part kinda scares me. Semis with 2 trailers on them.

Matt: Yeah, that does. But doesn’t that also sort of like at the same time make you a little bit more confident, right? I mean like sleepy drivers that had been driving for 19 hours, you know. It’s kinda bit dangerous too.

Craig: It’s already predicted that driving with the big rig is gonna be three times less expensive because they can deliver more. They’re gonna be going the speed limit or less. They only have to stop for fuel. It’s gonna be a whole lot different.

Matt: Brave new world we’re in right?

Craig: Yeah. You’ll be able to say to your grandkids… I remember when… and that will only be 10 years from now.

Matt: Back in my day, we drove cars.

Craig: That’s gonna be illegal eventually.

Ken: Craig Peterson our tech guru joining us as he does every Wednesday at 7:38. Thanks Craig. Have a great Christmas and we’ll talk to you next week.

Craig: Thanks. Merry Christmas guys.

Matt: merry Christmas to you too Craig. Appreciate you joining us.
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