May 30, 2021
[Following is an automated transcript of Week 1115podcast aired 2021-05-29]
Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] We've got thesesemiconductor shortages. What that means is various types of chipsare just not available and it's been hurting us all the way acrossour economy. And that's where we're going to start the day withtoday. Semiconductors.
[00:00:15] Man, this has been so bad, these semiconductorshortages, because what it means is we just cannot get the types ofdevices that we want because those raw components just aren'tavailable. I was talking with a gentleman earlier this week and hewas telling me how he has a special little app that tells him whenthere is a Sony PS five available for sale anywhere online.
[00:00:45] It's gotten that bad. First of all, Why does he wanta PS five so bad? I've never owned one or an X-Box or any of thosegaming consoles? Since the original Nintendo, we had a we as well.Cause we had all the exercise stuff that went along with the week.But anyways, that's a different story entirely.
[00:01:04] I'm sure a lot of you guys play a lot of video games,but. There really are not Sony available. And we're findingmuch the same problem in even the car industry where some of thesemajor manufacturers here in the U S have had to shut down lines.They've had, gone from three shifts down to a single shift everyday.
[00:01:30] And in some cases it's gotten even worse wherevehicle manufacturers are only. Making vehicles of few times aweek. It is incredible. What's been happening and there a number ofreasons for it. This isn't just one reason, but it does bring upthe real problem we could have with our criticalinfrastructure.
[00:01:53] How critical is it that we have computers that canrun our businesses, drive our cars, and fly our airplanes. I thinkit's pretty darn critical when you get right down to it. Yeah. Youcan probably get an extra year out of that computer, if you reallyneed to many times that computer's just plain broken, you justcan't use it.
[00:02:15] So you do need to replace it. But in reality, we'vegotten a little bit soft. We are not making most of the chips herein the U S anymore. Yes, it's us technology. But most of this is inSoutheast Asia, particularly in Taiwan. And do you remember what'shappening with Taiwan with the threats from China?
[00:02:38] China is flying over Taiwan right now with militaryjets in Taiwanese air space, because China has never officiallyrecognized that Taiwan is independent from the people's Republic ofChina. And do you know how socialists are? They're just going to goahead and take that land. What would happen if they did.
[00:03:00] Remember China really wants to get their hands on ourtop chip technology because that helps them in the military. Ithelps them with all of these facial recognition systems they havein China, the social credit systems that they have in China, by theway, all built primarily by us companies and sold to China to tracktheir people.
[00:03:23] Including the nasty things have been happening withthe Wiggers over there. It's just absolutely incredible as well asChristian communities and others in China. So all of this tech hasstuff they want to get their hands on. If they were to invadeTaiwan, what would happen? The Biden administration.
[00:03:40] There they've been a little soft on this. Unlikepresident Trump, who said, yeah, the Trump administration, we'renot going to tolerate any of this. And the Trump administrationshipped all kinds of military systems to Taiwan, so they couldpotentially defend themselves because we don't really want to getdrawn into a hot war, but.
[00:04:00] Oh, if they had taken over Taiwan, they would nowhave access to the U S technology on chip making. Now let meexplain what that means from a technology standpoint, the chipsthat we have are. into a wafer of silicone. I'm going to tryand keep this pretty simple. And then, and that silicone is grown.Cause you think of a crystal or maybe think of a still-life tightor it's like titers to leg might that you'd find in a cave.
[00:04:34] Those crystals are grown. They're humanly grown, andobviously you don't want any defects in them. So it's very hard todo to grow them. And we need those crystals for all kinds ofthings, including these solar panels that some people are so hot totrot about. I, Hey, I love the idea. Don't get me wrong.
[00:04:52] It's just right now, again, with solar panels, likeso many other things, don't think you're green because you. Are orputting up solar panels. You're not right. There's certainly otheradvantages to it, but you're not being green by doing that. Butwhat really matters is how much power does that chip use in orderto do a certain number of computations?
[00:05:17] And how much heat is given off by the chip. Thinkagain about the old Edison light bulbs that we've had and stillhave in some places and those Edison light bulbs, by the way, oneof the original ones still burning in New York city and the firedepartment after over a hundred years, that one light bulb justincredible.
[00:05:37] But think about that Edison light bulb, it gives offlight. Sure. But it also gives off heat. And the same thing is truewith. Anything electronic the movement of the electricity throughthat conductor or semiconductor create heat. Heat is a waste.That's part of the problem with Edison bulbs. It'd be one thing ifthey were giving off just straight light, the, but so much of thatenergy is used to generate heat that we don't want.
[00:06:06] And then we have to dissipate that heat somehow, butthat's another story. The same thing is true. When we're talkingabout these chips, the chips have a resistance to them. In fact,that's what a semiconductor does. It provide some resistance, sothat resistance is going to. Do what create heat. So you feel yourlaptop when you're running it and so hot to get over time, thelaptops have gotten faster and have actually created less heat,certainly poorer computational unit.
[00:06:44] They created a lot less heat. What we're looking atnow is if we can make these chips even smaller. We can decrease theamount of electricity they need, because it doesn't haveelectricity. It doesn't have to flow as far through the conductorsor semiconductors inside these chips. So that's what the race hasbeen over the years.
[00:07:09] The race has been how small can we make them? And bymaking them smaller, You're doing a couple of things. You're makingthem faster because electricity has to travel less distance. Eventhough electricity is really fast. When you're talking about abillion transistors inside one of these chips or more, you aretraveling through a whole lot of conductor and semiconductor.
[00:07:32] So you can make that chip faster by making it smallerand you can reduce the amount of power it needs, because you're notgoing to be giving off as much power via heat and heat generation.And that's important for everything, but particularly important forour mobile devices. Look at your apple watch or your iPhone or yourlaptop or your desktop.
[00:07:56] All of them need to consume less and less electricityas time goes on. So what we're talking about now are just teenytiny measurement. We're talking about nanometers. So if you goonline, you look up nano meter. Which is a foul. Yeah, there yougo. 10 to the negative nine meters. It's a billionth of ameter.
[00:08:21] Isn't that something looking it up right now, sell ita 1E-9.000000000. Give or take, and it's a unit of measurement thatis being used now in chips and chip designs. And we're seeing thesefaster and faster chips getting down into the five nanometerprocess that is incredibly small, incredibly.
[00:08:49] Fast potentially, but likely incredibly fast and usesa lot less electricity right now. We're seeing seven nanometers outof Taiwan and we're working on five nanometer, but we have such ashortage of chips right now that they're bringing some of these old15 nanometer. Chip fabs online, even 22 nanometer.
[00:09:14] I'm looking right now online at some of these oldchip fabricators that are being brought online and China reallywants to get their hands on some of this technology, because atthis point anyways, they really can't get to the seven nanoliterchips. China right now. I think is pretty much limited to 14nanometer.
[00:09:39] So we're still, I had in that race, but becausethey're being made in Taiwan, these chips that we're using here inthe us using us technology, and because we had the lockdown inTaiwan and pretty much worldwide, the whole supply chain gotinterrupted and these big car manufacturers just. Shut off theorders.
[00:10:01] So there's no reason for the manufacturers tocontinue to make these things are a little reason for them to makethem for the car industry in the current street, he thought we canjust turn it back on and we'll have the chips. And of course theydidn't, but it's also been compounded by the conditions in Taiwanright now.
[00:10:19] Because the Taiwanese centers for disease controlthis week raised it's epidemic warning level and is strengtheningtheir containment measures and making things even worse. Taiwan isin the midst of a severe drought. So they are. Rationing water inTaiwan. They're looking at cutoffs of two days a week.
[00:10:42] And water reduction plans are expected to decreasesupply to all major manufacturers by as much as 15%. So there yougo. In a nutshell, that's why we care. Nanometers and we're talkingabout chips. That's why we need to start making them back here inthe U S. And the good news, apple and others are doing exactlythat.
[00:11:03] Starting to bring some of this technology back fromTaiwan, into the U S and I think that's going to help keep us saferin the long run
[00:11:12]All electric vehicles are I think very cool. And somepeople give me a hard time because I am not a fan of it.
[00:11:20] If you think you're being green, because you're not.And I went through the whole science behind that the life cycle ofan electric vehicle is much more. Dangerous and hazardous andpolluting in the environment. Then even a diesel truck is just togive you an idea of small truck. So that's, let's put that aside,but in reality, these things I think are potentially thefuture.
[00:11:50] Now there's a lot of things we've got to take careof, for instance. Our electric grid is not set up for electriccars. Our electric grid is not set up for us to have windmills inour backyard or to have solar panels on our roofs. It's set up tohave a main power station of some sort, whether it's nuclear, whichby the way is green or whether it might be.
[00:12:17] Be coal or natural gas or wood or trash. That's whatthe grid is set up for. So we have some problems there and there'sanother big problem. And that has to do with how much power one ofthese vehicles can hold, because I don't know about you, but havinga, what is it? The brand new car that came out a Fiat or somebodyand his electric vehicle and its range is 78 miles.
[00:12:46]In some places that might be okay, but progress. Theproblem is I'll write, let's say I'll put up with stopping everyhour to recharge these cars, unless it's a rapid recharger, you'regoing to be there for an hour and a half or more. And even with therapid recharger, you're going to be there for a least 20minutes.
[00:13:07] Now Tesla had some innovative ideas on how to dealwith that. Like the, I don't know if you ever saw it a batterypack, so you'd pull into the station and it would just tradebattery packs for you. The idea was it's right in the center. GMhas this concept of the roller skate, where the entire car reallyis built into this frame.
[00:13:29] That kind of looks like roller skate. And then on topof that, Goes your car and there's some thinking maybe we can makeit so that you can just swap out your rollerskate. Make it nice andsimple and hopefully relatively inexpensive, but we still don't seethe range on the vehicles. And as of yet, we haven't seen any hugeforays by any of the big auto makers.
[00:13:54] Of course, Nissan had it to leaf, which. Pretty wellaccepted GM had their entry. And I chuckled because it was in a lotof ways. It was a joke. And of course they're up with better stuffhere in the future, but I want to play a little bit here. I'm goingto play about 25 seconds worth of an ad.
[00:14:12] And then we're going to talk about it a bit.
[00:14:16] Unknown: [00:14:16] It's got atargeted 775 pound feet of torque. It's targeted to go from zero to60 in the mid four second range. It's a driving experience. That'spure unfiltered exhilaration from the moment you hit theaccelerator. Oh, and it's an F-150 introducing the all electricF-150
[00:14:40] Craig Peterson: [00:14:40]lightning.
[00:14:41] So you noticed there were no mentions in there of nobirds were harmed in January generating electricity here. And ofcourse, a little tongue in cheek because of course birds are harmedin generate electricity, particularly windmill, but anyways,they're not going for the eco greeny. They're not going for thePrius driver.
[00:15:01] You remember the stats on the Prius where theysurveyed the drivers of Prius's. This was probably five. Maybe alittle more years ago. And the number one reason they found peopledrove a Prius. 70% of the time in fact, was they drove a Priusbecause of what they thought other people would think of them.
[00:15:23] So there they are driving this car that they'redriving it for one reason, because they, I think it's going to makeother people think that they're just fantastic people. I obviouslyI disagree with that. I think that's little bit of a problem, butwhat is what they're doing here with that Ford commercial is theyare working on mainstreaming.
[00:15:46] Yes. Electric vehicles. Can you imagine this a 700plus foot point foot pound torque in a sub $40,000 truck? It's justamazing. And you can even use the batteries that are in this truck.Of course, there's a lot of batteries in that truck to run powertools while you're out at a work site. Which I think is a greatidea.
[00:16:12] And you can even use it to power your house. Theyhave a special adapter you can use to hook up to your house so thatyou can get up to three days. They say of electricity in yourhouse. If the power goes out, No mention in here of, any of thesegreeny things, right? Oh, none of oases talking points are in thatad.
[00:16:37] At least I didn't hear him on, did you guys hearthem, but this is going to be amazing. This of course is Ford'sbest-selling vehicle, the F-150 and I drove one for years. It wasvery handy with the horses and chickens and everything here. AndI'm looking forward to this thing coming out. I don't think I'mgoing to buy one, by the way.
[00:16:58] They've also got this Mustang mark II, which is thiselectric Mustang thingy. And then they have an electric transitvan. And the reason I don't think I'm going to buy one is it justdoesn't have the range. Now you can get better equipped lighteningtrucks in that sub $40,000 one. You can also go ahead and getbigger batteries.
[00:17:22] You can do a whole bunch of things, but this range isa combined output here, a 426 horsepower estimated range of 230miles. And the extended range of this F-150 lightning is going toget an even. Bigger horsepower rating, 563 horsepower and anestimated range of 300 miles. And 775 foot pounds of torque, whichis just stump polling.
[00:17:56] It's absolutely amazing. So I don't know about you.I'm not in the mode for pain, 60 ish grand for an electric truckthat is only going to take me 230 miles. That, but maybe that's me.And then looking further into the stats on this thing, it can do abunch of towing. It can have a 77, a hundred pounds of towing.
[00:18:22] You can get Reduce cargo, excuse me, reduce cargocourse. If you're getting the bigger battery and looking at anillustration of the F-150 lightening, what they're doing is similarto what GM had proposed way back with the roller skate. The entiredrive train is underneath the truck. And it's just like an oldframe.
[00:18:44] You remember, trucks used to have frames now? TheF-150 is, I think still do have frames underneath, but the wholebottom of the truck is one piece. If you will, obviously there'slittle pieces to it, but one major component and then the cab andbed and everything else just sits right on top of it.
[00:19:03] It's amazing. Now with this truck, if you connectedto 150 kilowatt fast charger, you're going to get 41 miles in 10minutes. So how long does it take you fill up with gas? Probablyabout 10 minutes. How long is it good for? It was my car 400, 500miles in this case that 10 minute stop. At the fuel station isgoing to get you 41 miles.
[00:19:29] And if you can find the, just the 50 kilowatt fastcharger, it's going to take you 91 minutes to get 41 miles ofrange. It's not there yet, but it's very obvious that Ford isaiming for the truck driver. And more particularly if I was aconstruction guy and I was taking my truck out and I needed to plugin tools and I don't have to drive very far.
[00:19:56] I look seriously at that new F-150 lightning.
[00:20:00]President Biden . I've got an article in mynewsletter this week about what he's been doing when it comes tothe hackers, China, is it Russia? What's going on? He's beenblaming. It looks like. Russia for some of the hacks that China hasactually been carrying out, but no matter what the bottom line is,we are getting hacked and this is a very big problem.
[00:20:28] We have to modernize our technology strategy. Becausethis ideological divide between these authoritan or authoritarians,whether it's a dictatorship like the socialists have in China,where you have chairman Mao, who is chairman for life now, orPutin. President Putin, who is president for life over inRussia.
[00:20:53]It's absolutely amazing. They are coming after us. Andso is North Korea, of course, again, socialist dictator for lifeover there as well, Iran not so socialist, but a very fascist inmany ways, which is typically a form of socialism anyways. We needto be able to protect ourselves. It's a real problem, frankly.
[00:21:18] 1947 world war two was over and George Kennan, Ryeah. Kennan introduced this concept of containment and thatcontainment concept was used throughout the entire cold war. And ofcourse you probably know what that is. At least, excuse me. I hopeyou do. But today we don't have that cold war anymore.
[00:21:45] What is it that we have? Why would China be attackingthis? We know, for instance, a China comes after our intellectualproperty and they w they come after it because it helps themmilitarily. If they know what we're doing, what we're ordering.What's going on that we know they come after us as well, becausethey want to cause some havoc.
[00:22:11] There's no question about that. Some of these othersmaller countries come after us because they need the hardcurrency. Ultimately they want to trade in those Bitcoin for usdollars, which of course can be spent here. But. This whole systemthat we have right now is really on the brink of a new economy.
[00:22:34] Look at the technology we've been using. Look at thenumber of people that have been working from home. We're sitting onthe edge of three simultaneous bubbles. Right now we have thehousing bubble. We have the stock market bubble and we have thecryptocurrency bubble and we've seen downs in all of those justover the last week or so.
[00:22:56]We'll see what happens, but there's no denying thatthey're bubbles are home values adjusted for inflation, have notbeen higher than the last 100 years as an example. So there's a lotfor us to look at. And when these bad guys are under the same typesof financial pressures we are under, because, collapses tend to beworldwide.
[00:23:21] What are they going to do? What's ultimately going tohappen? Here is what president Biden thinks should happen withthese two executive orders that came out really It, it has to dowith federal government supply chains. And that is people whoobviously are selling to the feds. And I want you to think mostlyabout department of defense here, and we deal with the departmentof defense contractors and tightening them up.
[00:23:50] But in getting them to the point they should be at.And there's a lot to be concerned about it from that standpoint,but they have been releasing some details over the last few months,really. They started in April this year, and they're saying thatbecause of the supply chain problem that we had with solar winds,they are now.
[00:24:15] Pushing out some rules that require the people whosell to the federal government to keep a certain level ofcybersecurity. We've talked a little bit before about CMMC, whichis. Again, it's a cyber security maturity model that's out thereand they are requiring certain federal contractors to meetthat.
[00:24:40] We've also talked about some of the NIST standards,which is the national Institute of science and technology. In fact,we talked about their password standard and how a year and a halfor so ago, they changed the way we need to do passwords. And if youdon't know what that is, have a look at my. A special report onpasswords.
[00:25:02] And I go through that in some detail, but there's anexecutive order on American supply chains that came out in Februaryand it's leaning pretty heavily on these newer emergingtechnologies, including secure access to semiconductors. And wetalked about them earlier in the show today, the high capacitybatteries.
[00:25:24] Because again, if we're not innovating. In the, youname it. But in end in the automotive field, we're going to fallbehind what's important automotive. We just talked about it. Lastsegment here. Batteries. So it's covering batteries and materialsthat are used to create them. So they both of these orders addressthe need for us to really work closely together with our allieseconomically, as well as national security.
[00:25:55] But that's exactly what we've been doing. Isn't it?What it really boils down to in my mind is democracy versusauthoritarianism. It was so funny that they called president Trumpand authoritarian a decade, her right. He was liking to Hitlerconstantly. I thought if you brought him up, you automatically lostthe argument.
[00:26:18] But in reality, now we're seeing more of a hands-onfrom the federal government more authoritarianism. And I got aquestion whether or not that's what we really want. Do we need adigital politic. This guiding doctrine, that places digitalconsiderations at the forefront of our national strategy. Is thissomething that should be handled by the state or the businessesinvolved?
[00:26:47]We've seen all kinds of mixed. Pros and cons to eachone of those strategies over the years, we know governmentcontrols, centralized government control, ultimately causes seriousproblems serious as in the deaths of over a hundred million peoplein the last century alone. So I'm not sure that's the bestidea.
[00:27:09] And I have to say work. I With defense contractors,even not really a defense contractor, someone that makes somethingthat's sold to a defense contractor. Having a one size fits allcybersecurity policy, a cybersecurity czar, and these executiveorders pushing everything down does not make sense. It doesn't makesense for a real small company that makes a wiring harness to haveto meet the same.
[00:27:38]Cyber security requirements as a big BAE systems, theydon't have the time. They don't have the money. It can cost amillion dollars over the course of three years for even a smallcompany to meet these federal standards that are required. If youtake a contract from the federal government or from one of thesecontractors.
[00:28:04] So you are a subcontractor, all of those requirementsthat are put on that huge military contractor, all of thoserequirements get pushed down to you. So this just doesn't make awhole lot of sense to me. I'm very concerned about it. There's abipartisan bill. That's moving right now called the democracytechnology partnership act.
[00:28:26] And they're trying to get some collaboration andinnovation amongst democracies. I think it's good now that thereare rules in place that have changed, that allows competitors totalk with each other when it comes to cyber security.
[00:28:43]Internet Explorer was Microsoft's first major forayinto the internet browsing world internet browsing didn't reallytake off until almost the mid nineties. And it was really cool. Iremember when I first started using. Web browsing and websites andbuilding them with NCSA mosaic. Oh my gosh. Those were the daysheady days back then.
[00:29:09] And we were just thinking about everything that couldhappen, how great it would be. And there were no hackers to speakof online. You didn't have to worry about drive by downloads or somany of the other problems that we have today. And Microsoft tookthat NCSA mosaic browser code base and created something.
[00:29:33] They called internet Explorer. Now the history ofinternet Explorer, frankly. Is rather interesting when you getright down to it. Internet Explorer. Yeah. It's been around for along time, but in genetics, Explorer was one of the worst browsersout there for a very long time. It was just terrible.
[00:29:57] And one of the things that Microsoft did that reallygot. With the whole internet community upset with them is theybuilt it right into their operating system. Absolutely. They usedthe code here from again, mosaic, which was this early commercialweb browser back in 2003. It, the whole project started in1994.
[00:30:25]I'm looking right now, Wikipedia. I remember thesethings happening. It's just nuts to think about how far it's gone,but they took internet Explorer and they bolted it into theoperating system. So the operating system now supposedly wasdependent on internet Explorer. Now it's an interesting concept tothink about if all they have to do is maintain a userinterface.
[00:30:51] That's web based for the operating system. That'sreally cool. Microsoft internet Explorer is some 5 million lines ofcode that is a lot of programming to maintain. And then on top ofthat, of course you have all of the user interface code that'ssitting there in the operating system. So I think this is mysuspicion.
[00:31:12] What Microsoft is trying to do is make their life alittle bit easier. But by doing that by hard wiring in internetExplorer, into the operating system, they ended up making it sothat other companies like the Firefox guys, Mozilla, they could notrun independently on inch, on a windows. And a third party, likeDell could not decide, Hey, I don't want to use internet Explorerbecause Google's paying me to install Google Chrome.
[00:31:43] So I want to put Chrome on windows. So you justcouldn't do any of that. So they got a whole bunch of flack. Theindustry came after them and because of that, so did the departmentof justice. And the United States versus Microsoft case, veryfundamental. And it was absolutely, it was essential, I thinkbecause Microsoft never would have done anything about this, butthey developed Microsoft this thing called ActiveX technology,which is a security nightmare and remains one to this very daywhere you could effectively as a website.
[00:32:25] Tell the internet Explorer to do almost anything youwanted to do. And there were bugs after bugs. I don't have a count.It might be interesting to see what the actual count would be, butit was, it had to be in the thousands of bugs that were fixedsecurity bugs that were fixed and internet Explorer because ofactive X and because of some of these other things.
[00:32:48] So it's just been absolutely terrible. One of thequestions I get asked most often to this day. What do we do when wedon't want to use internet Explorer or more commonly, what is thebest browser to use while I'm online? And the answer to that kindof varies. It depends, right? That's the answer, but as a generalrule using Firefox is a good idea.
[00:33:20] Now, one of the things I like about Firefox for anindividual or for a, an extremely small business, like a smalloffice home office, where you're not tying into a corporate networkat all. One of the things that's really good is Firefox. Uses aversion of DNS, which is the main name, service. It's what yourcomputer uses in order to find websites online, Firefox uses aversion of DNS that is.
[00:33:50] Encrypted and protected so that your internet serviceprovider cannot see the website names you're looking up and cannotintercept it. And that's the bigger thing. You don't want it to beintercepted because one of the major hacks, and this is affectedmillions of people. Homed and businesses.
[00:34:10] One of the major hacks is let's just go in. We canhack the router and then we'll change the router DNS settings sothat it uses our DNS and our DNS by the way is great because itredirects you. If you think you want to go to bank of America, ittakes you to bank of America dot China. Okay. A fake site, not areal site.
[00:34:31] And you may not even know. You may not even be ableto tell unless you look really closely. So that is a big plus forFirefox as well as it has all kinds of anti-trafficking technology.Anti-malware technology built right in, they've just done a bang upjob. The reason I do not like it for bigger businesses is thatsame.
[00:34:54] Feature that DNS feature because what we do when wego into a business, and one of the things we do is we change theirDNS servers to use some commercial DNS servers that we have fromCisco that get updated minute by minute for the sole purpose oftrying to stop the bad guys. And they're very good at it.
[00:35:16] It stopped being ransomware just by DNS. If you'reusing Firefox inside one of these networks, the problem is Firefoxis going to try and hide the DNS request. So it was not so much asI care that they're being hidden, except that might be going to amalicious site. It said, I can't see any of them.
[00:35:36] And I cannot tell your web browser or your computernot to go to that website because that particular site or thatparticular internet server is actually malicious. So there's thetwo sides for Firefox. So if you're a regular little home user, getFirefox, it's free. It's a great little browser. If you are abusiness, you can still use Firefox with things like Cisco'sumbrella.
[00:36:04] But what you need to do is turn off the DNS overHTTPS or TLS in which gets a little advanced. You can probably findit. If you'd duck, duck, go search it online. And that'll get youthe answers you need. So turn that off so that all of your DNSrequests are going through the filter, whatever it might be.
[00:36:24] A Barracuda has a DNS filter. I don't like Barracuda.Don't think I'm endorsing them, but it's better to use theBarracuda DNS filter. If that's all you have, then nothing. Let metell ya. And then there are also free DNS servers that are going tobe fantastic for you to check them out. I talked about them thislast week.
[00:36:44] I got a lot of emails, open dns.com open ope, N D N Sthe letters, DNS domain name service, or. Dynamic name server orwhatever you want. How are you going to remember it? Open dns.comand there it's easy enough. You just set it up on your ad droughtor, and you're off and running. So that's my general favorite.
[00:37:10] If you want something that's more secure, you cantake a look at our friend, the epic browser, epi C. It has beenvery good in the past, and I assume it's going to continue to bepretty good in the future. Microsoft's newest ed edge browser. Ithink there's been three different browsers. They call ed justunder what Microsoft, they call them all the same thing, eventhough it's entirely different code basis. And what were there?Seven different versions of windows that were entirely different? Iwas just, ah, drives me crazy. The current version of the edgebrowser from Microsoft is based on Google's Chrome browser. So keepthat in mind, if you're using edge, Microsoft is looking over yourshoulder.
[00:37:55] Google may be looking over your shoulder as well. Alittle bit. The edge browser also uses Google chromium base, butthey've gone through and Labatt itemized it pretty seriously. Ifyou're on a Mac, you can even do this on a windows computer. Thefastest browser, generally speaking is safari, which is an appleproduct and it's available for free S a F a R.
[00:38:18] I. And it also like most apple products doesn't likeyou being tracked. And so it has a lot of anti-trafficking stuff.Built-in. And it also not this too. The safari browser has a wholebunch of anti-malware stuff built in. So whether you're using iOSon your iPhone or I panned or Mac iOS or windows, you can getsafari.
[00:38:46] And I had recommended that. So Fari frankly, is thebrowser I use for a little bit more secure stuff. And then I alsouse opera, the opera O P E R a browser. You might want to have alook at it as well, but if you're looking for ease of use andcompatibility, I think you're probably about right. Sticking withthe Firefox browser.
[00:39:09] I do use that. So I actually use all of thesebrowsers in different circ*mstances. I also use the brave browserand others. I just don't want to confuse you guys. Firefox stickwith Firefox and you're probably going to be pretty well off onrare occasions. Firefox is not going to work for you. And in thatcase, you might consider a Google Chrome or the edge browser.
[00:39:34] If you're using a cloud-based to service a websitethat is obviously a website for something you're doing. And it doesnot work with Firefox. It might not even work with the default onthe Microsoft edge browser. And that's because that websitemight've been poorly coded, had not written right. And requires theold Microsoft engineer Explorer.
[00:40:04] If so you can turn on compatibility mode so that theedge browser will act just like the insecure bug ridden internetExplorer, but try and force the vendor to upgrade their site sothat it works with modern browsers rather than having to stick withthat old piece of software. That's dangerous as can be internetExplorer.
[00:40:29]I have always been fascinated by it ever since I sawpeople who were communicating, using computers and it, I alwaysthought it just. It would be so wonderful if we could help peopleout, particularly people who are locked in who have a brain that'sfunctioning fully, and yet their body isn't cooperating, they can'tcommunicate, or they can't communicate well.
[00:40:54] And of course, that comes to mind. Of course, one ofthe greatest scientific minds of our generation, Stephen Hawkins,who was in a wheelchair, he was unable to move. And later in life,other than just a little bit with his face and mouth, and he usedthat to communicate. And it's just an incredible thing. I can'timagine being in a position like that.
[00:41:19] So when I see these technological advances that helppeople out, even in a minor way, I am just overjoyed, reallyoverjoyed. So we've got to, I want to talk about right now. One isa brain implant that ARS Technica is John Timmer was talking abouthere about a week ago. And he was talking about robotic arms.
[00:41:42] Now you might've seen them before. There's varioustypes of robotic arms and they have different types offunctionality depending. Right. Well, one of the problems thatwe've had with robotic arms is how much force can you put on them?I, again, I remember the first time I saw someone who had lost, uh,the forearm and of course the hand and he had on one of those kindof captain hook things, appliances with a rubber band on it toclose it.
[00:42:13] And he was able to pull one of the muscles in hisarms in order to open it and close it. I thought, well, that'sreally cool. Those have advanced now, and there are projects with3d printers. I forget the name of the company. I had them on myradio show. Maybe a decade ago now been awhile and they wereselling 3d printers.
[00:42:34] And when you bought their printer, they would giveyou the plans to make a specific artificial prosthesis for. Childthat couldn't afford one. So it might be for a leg or an arm or soI guess something else. And you bought the printer, they wouldprovide you with the material that you needed as well as the designspecifically for that person.
[00:43:01] And that you could print it up. It might take acouple of days and you ship it off. And many of these kids were inAfrica. There are some here in the us, and of course in Russia, andthis was, I thought an amazing project. It was just so cool again,because they're helping these kids get a little bit ofmobility.
[00:43:21] Then we came out with some of these robotic arms thatcan be controlled through your brain. I don't know if you've seenthese. Arms, there's been also some major advancement in justthinking about moving a cursor on a computer screen and thecomputer can track your brain enough to be able to move that cursoraround.
[00:43:46] And basically what you're doing is you've lost a limbor you've lost mobility. You think about moving your hand or a leg,and usually it's your arm and your hand. And that can be picked up.Of course, that's per person, that's programmable per person. Thenthey figure out what the pattern is in your brain.
[00:44:06] And then they tie it all in so that now you cancontrol a cursor on a computer, which means you can communicate.Robotic arms a little bit different because what you have now issomething that can reach out. These things have all of the jointand the flexibility and functionality of a regular hand, exceptfor.
[00:44:30] The feedback loop and that's been really important.How do you know if you are actually touching something? How do youknow if you're squeezing it too hard? Like that egg and earlyrobotic arms? It was very visual. So you watch that arm and you'dsee, okay. It now has a grip on that ball or that pencil orwhatever you pick it up and you all visual.
[00:44:58] And so you're able to pick it up and you know thatyou've got it. Maybe you don't know how hard you're holding it, butthat's okay. You had to track the arm visually as you moved itaround and estimate really when you had that grip, that was strongenough on the object by looking at it. And obviously that's just anincredible improvement over a missing limb or potentiallyparalysis, but it's not very intuitive.
[00:45:25] And the question is how do you make things intuitivefor the brain when they're obviously foreign? We're going to talkabout an extra thumb here in a minute too, but this is justabsolutely phenomenal. It's called propyl. Yeah. Prope re O ceptionproprioception. And it's a sense that we have, this has beendifficult to reconstruct that ties the sense of touch and pressureand.
[00:45:55] Knowing where something is. So you can close youreyes. And on the side of the road, when the police offers is thereand close your eyes, hold your arm out and touch your nose. Right.Hopefully you can do that. I'm doing that right now, here in thestudio. I'm touching my notes with my eyes closed with my arm,starting out fully extended.
[00:46:16] That's the sense we're talking about. That's very,very difficult. How do you build that in? Because we've been ableto build in a little bit of sense of touch feedback for these arms,a little bit of pressure feedback, but we haven't been able toreally understand how the brain processes, all this informationthat's sent by these sensory nerve cells in the hand, in order tolet you know where it is.
[00:46:42] And what it's doing. So for this new research at teamand planted two electrode arrays into the part of the brain thatspecifically handles information coming from the skin, and they'reable to activate these electrode and produce the sensation ofsomething, interacting with the Palm of the hand, as well as thefinger.
[00:47:04] So they've made a whole lot of progress here, andthis is very cool. They were able to tie it into a robotic arm.They got a study together, got some funding for it. And they got aparticipant who had been paralyzed from the neck down. And thisdoesn't save as male or female, but. Default gender right inEnglish.
[00:47:29] As he sold, say, he'd been controlling this roboticarm for about two years by using brain implant in the motor controlregion of the brain. And he could successfully use the arm evenwithout sensation. He'd gotten pretty good at it. Uh, so for theseexperiments, they had some different tests because they wantedadditional, tactile feedback.
[00:47:53] They wanted to be able to somehow tie into thisperception that your body has, of where your body parts are. Haveyou ever tried to tickle yourself? Usually it doesn't work. Right.But a third person or a second person tickling you may, it'sdefinitely going to work. That's all party, these same systems. Sothey come up with a whole bunch of tests.
[00:48:16] I'm not going to go into a lot of detail on thetests, but they did say that having a sense of. Touch and theability to understand where that arm and hand were in space,dramatically improve performance. And that makes sense. Hold on asense to me, it w it really increased or decreased actually thetime it took to pick up something to move something, to drop it inevery case.
[00:48:43] So. I am pretty darn excited about this, and I hopeit's going to be able to help a lot of people very, very soon. Thisis the university of Pittsburgh medical center, by the way, that'sbeen conducting these experiments. Now there's another one I wantto talk about. And I thought this was really cool. I saw this abouta couple of weeks ago.
[00:49:02] I think it was, and this is a robotic extra thumb.What they did is they placed a robotic thumb on a hand underneaththe little finger. So if you're looking at your hand right now, Igot my left hand out in front of me. I've got my thumb here on thefar left side. I've got my four fingers pointing up and on theright hand side opposite where your real thumb is, they put.
[00:49:30] An extra thumb, like a robotic thumb that can, canbend up and down and a little other lateral movements. This study,I think was phenomenal. And there were 36 people that were part ofthe experiment. This was at Danielle Clode, university, college,London, and her colleagues. Uh, and it's, it's phenomenal. So whenwe get back, I'm going to play a little bit of audio.
[00:49:57] That is from a story over there in the UK about this.I'm going to tell you a little bit more about this thumb and the.Impact to the hat on the brain. One of the things I think it wasfascinating to me anyways, was it did change the brain inunexpected ways, basically the brains of these people. And this wasdetermined by cat scans and watching the activity when they weremoving their hand, the brains were changed.
[00:50:27] Two, if you will, uh, look at the hands and as moreof a single unit than individual units. I thought that was reallyfascinating and that extra thumb became part of the brainsunderstanding of the hand. So this is the kind of thing we can belooking forward to. Now, this one is it's kind of cool. It's kindof fun.
[00:50:53] We're going to find a lot of different uses for, andit's part of what's fun is what they did in the experiments. Sowe'll talk about that as well. Hey, I want to point out if you havequestions about cyber security, I might have the answers for youand you'll get those answers in the form of some stuff.
[00:51:13] Special reports. I wrote, if you subscribed to myemail list, just go to Craig peterson.com/subscribe, and I'll makesure I send them all to you and get you on the right track.
[00:51:25]this is augmenting a human and I think this is thefuture. We are going to be augmented. And how many movies have beenmade about that movies where they're saying model? Yeah, we'll justtie basically Google into your brain and have Google site into yourbrain.
[00:51:41] That have as a thought. And you'll get a responsefrom Google, which I think is scary. Look at Google now and howthey're tracking you. Imagine if they get a copy of every one ofyour thoughts, but things like this that make us super human. Ithink are going to become more mainstream. So Google, for instance,had the Google glass, you might remember that these glasses typethings that you wore, Apple's done some work on somethingsimilar.
[00:52:11] And the idea is they can project in front of you anartificial reality. Maybe that our official reality is just tellingyou to turn left, to get to grandma's house or where the best foodin town is. Or maybe you're playing a game. All of which are cool.This that's going to happen. This is really something that is goingto happen.
[00:52:30] And it's going to talk to you with a set of speakersthat are right on those glasses. And it's going to be, I think,potentially amazing not reading your brain, but helping you tonavigate a, read an audio book to you, do all kinds of things, andyou can already get Alexa. Which is, of course Amazon's digitalassistant in a lot of different configurations from your car allthe way on out through these little mobile devices.
[00:52:59] In this case, we're talking about a third thumb andthat third or second thumb, I should say, it's really a third onebecause you have two hands, right? Two thumbs, but a second thumbon one hand. And the pictures I'm looking at from the experimenthad it on the right hand. I don't think it really matters, but it'sopposite your normal thumb.
[00:53:20] It's not a fancy thing. It doesn't look human. It'sclose to the wrist. W on your hand, but it still is on your handand you control this thumb and how it moves based on why ourwireless sensors that are on your big toes. So you wiggle the toeand you can move the thumb in different directions and also have itclench the grip.
[00:53:49] And these experimenters gave the thumb to people forabout five days and the participants were. Told to use the thumb inregular, old things in the world. So they use it in the labs, ofcourse, and they wanted the participants to really push theenvelope about what was possible. And they didn't want the lab tojust think of all of the different experiments they wanted theparticipants to think of things.
[00:54:17] Maybe they hadn't thought of. So I'm looking at avideo that's really cool people think of this guys. You can hold acup of coffee and stir it all with the same hand, because you usethat third thumb to grab onto the coffee and then your right thumband forefinger. In order to stir the coffee. I think that'scool.
[00:54:42] There were other people did things like bloombubbles, right? You hold the little bottle of the bubble soap,water. And in the fake thumb. And then again, use your fingers tohold the little thing that you are blowing into. So it's reallycool. And it did change the brain. What this showed us, I thinkmore than anything else was our brains are capable of controllinglimbs and dependence pended, GS dependencies.
[00:55:14] Yeah, appendages. There you go. That, that you don'tnormally have, and it leads him into think about cats here in theNortheast. I don't know if you've ever noticed cats with a thumb.Have you ever noticed that it's really a Northeast phenomenon? Andapparently the captains of these old boats loved these cats becausethey could go on the ship and chase the rats and kill the rat andhold on really well in the heavy weather and even climb up on theropes because I had a thumb, we had a cat like that.
[00:55:52] And it wasn't the brightest cat one, a Fox caught itwhen it was in our yard one time, but that cat could pick things upoff the floor and using the thumb. Now, cats don't normally have athumb, but some of these cats here in the Northeast, they have athumb. It's a real thumb. They really can pick things up.
[00:56:12] So they, this experiment proved that we can, ashumans control an appendage, like an extra thumb. So let's play alittle bit here about what happened a little bit of the report.The
[00:56:26] Unknown: [00:56:26] additional thumbcould cradle a cup of coffee while the same hands, four fingersheld a spoon to stare in milk. While some participants use thethumb to peel a banana, blow bubbles, or even play the guitar tounderstand how the extra thumb effected people's brains.
[00:56:40] The researchers gave them an MRI scan before andafter the experiments.
[00:56:45] Craig Peterson: [00:56:45] Is thatcool or what. And you can find more online. I duck goat it, you canjust duck, duck go a robotic extra thumb, and you'll be able tofind the video and more reports on it, but we will see what ends uphappening. With our appendages what are we going to be attaching toour bodies in the future?
[00:57:07] We know we are going to be using those glasses likeGoogle glass. We'll see what it ends up looking is it going toproject right? Enjoy your eyes. What's going to happen here. We'reseeing heads up displays in our cars where the speed you're going,the maps, et cetera, are projected right on.
[00:57:25] The windshield. So you don't have to move your head abig direction, in order to see what's going on. So lots of stuff.And we're starting to understand the brain a little bit better whenit comes to some of this stuff, dark side. My gosh a little bit of,a little bit about the dark web, because you guys are the best andbrightest, right?
[00:57:47] So the dark web of course, is that part of theinternet that was created to keep things secret. No, not totallysecret, but the identities of people posting things on the dark webare hard to determine. And it is in fact, something that ismaintained by our military and was developed in order to allowpeople in other countries to communicate effectively with the CIA,with the military, et cetera, without.
[00:58:19] Being caught by their government. So the dark web isa pretty secure place, but because of that, it's a place wherepeople go to conduct illicit transactions. This is the place wherethe. The major site that was out there that it's called silk roadwas man, I can't remember how many billions of dollars they saywent through the silk road website, but they were sellingeverything you can think of for drugs or drug running, a gunrunning some of these military weapons.
[00:58:58] you name it? I don't even want to talk about some ofthe stuff that was being sold there on that website. Now there'sother websites and taken over, but we caught that guy by the way.And all the transactions were in between. Coin. So those peoplethat think that Bitcoin is somehow impossible to track you arewrong.
[00:59:19] And those who think that the dark web is a placewhere you can go and really be anonymous. Again, you are wrong.More technically we're talking about something called the onionnetwork, the Tor browser, and it is an interesting thing. So whenwe get back. We're going to talk about a court case, a really weirdcourt case involving the dark web.
[00:59:47] You've heard before about trust amongst thieves, thiskind of throws it entirely out the window, shall we say
[00:59:56]You might've heard of DarkSide. I mentioned them hereon the show before. DarkSide is a bad guy, right? It's a group ofpeople that got together who had been experts at ransomware. And sowhat they ended up doing is deciding, Hey, we want to make abusiness. We're going to do ransomware. And because we're so goodat it, we're going to sell ransomware as a service.
[01:00:28] And this ransomware is a service. All they did wasthey would take a cut of what you made off of their ransomware.They do things like provide tech support. So you ran some poor guy,some poor, small business, and that small business now is, a reallyhurting and you say Pay up sucker.
[01:00:50] It's going to be whatever it is. I think most of thetime for very small businesses, about $40,000 and you need to buyBitcoin and you can't how to have a lot. I don't know. Why do I buyBitcoin? So you contact. To the DarkSide, a webs support site, andguess what they do at that point? They can help you.
[01:01:13] Okay. So go to this site. This is what you're goingto see. Click on this. They have little user guides. They will helpyou when you're encrypted. Do you just give them the key andthey'll tell you, okay. So use this key and this software todecrypt it. Just like a real business bottom line. Theydisappeared.
[01:01:32] You might've heard about this. Of course, DarkSideattacked the colonial pipeline. And if you live in the SoutheastUnited States, you were hit perk too. Darn hard by this, becausethat shut down over a thousand gas stations, they ran out ofgasoline because it was not getting shipped via the pipeline. Sooff they went and a DarkSide said there, I think there's a littletoo much heat here.
[01:02:03] At least that's what we were thinking. InitiallyDarkSide was trying to avoid prosecution. And so they shut downtheir website. Where was the website? Obviously? Wasn't out therefor you on DarkSide.com. No, it was on the dark web while they shutdown. And apparently they were not paying out these people thatthey were providing ransomware services to.
[01:02:32] Isn't that kind of interesting. So Russian speakingperson, you use the handle darks up for DarkSide support had XSSdot IIS. Guess what that is. Yeah, a recruiting site for these badguys. Now, you're not going to be able to get there. If you're noton the dark web, you shouldn't be able to get there just ingeneral, but he was trying to recruit him affiliates for DarkSideand DarkSide was the new ransomware as a service kid in town.
[01:03:05]And it was looking for business partners until apartner could come along and say I have a hundred million emailaddresses or. I'm going to go after a company X like colonialpipeline. And so they become an affiliate of DarkSide. And as anaffiliate, now they can send out the ransomware, try and getsomebody at colonial to click on it.
[01:03:29] And then once inside then DarkSide takes over andthey go ahead and download important files from the machines thatare compromised. That's part of the one-two punch that they weredoing. And the punch that we saw that happened on Metro PD down inWashington, DC, where the bad guys got in down there and threatenedto not decrypt stuff unless a paid up.
[01:03:57]And then secondarily, you said. Since you're notpaying that ransom, pay us this ransom and you have so many days,or we're going to start releasing information from the privatepolice records. And they actually did end up releasing some of thatinformation. All of that sort of stuff is part of the ransomware asa service.
[01:04:16]This is interesting and DarkSide has made a bunch ofmoney. There's some newly released figures from a company calledchain analysis and they track cryptocurrency. Trading. Yeah. Guesswhat? It's not completely private. So chain analysis said theDarkSide netted at least $60 million in its first seven months.
[01:04:44] That's a small fortune. Actually that's a pretty bigfortune 46 million of it. Came in the first three months of 2021and Darkseid made another $10 million this month with about 5million coming from colonial pipeline. You probably heard aboutthat. Colonial paid the ransom. And I saw an interview with the CEOof colonial, who said we didn't know if we'd be able torecover.
[01:05:13] And it's basically, it's a small business, my words,small price to pay to know we can get back in business. So theymade the 5 million from colonial and 4.4 million from the chemicaldistribution company known as Brenntag. And then last week,DarkSide went dark. And I mentioned that on the show as well.
[01:05:37] And this guy, dark sub said that his group had lostcontrol of the infrastructure and it Bitcoin. Does that mean thatmaybe Interpol the S somebody shut them down because. We haveverified that there was a huge transaction where all of the moneywas taken out of their bit coin account. Okay, so the servers canthe access to anymore the hosting panels to see panels been blockedand the hosting support service isn't providing any information,except quote, you ready for this at the request of law enforcementauthorities.
[01:06:25] Okay. Yeah. And within a couple hours of the seizurefunds from the payment server were withdrawn to an unknown account.And Darkseid hasn't been heard from since now DarkSide is supposedto be paying affiliates 75% of ransoms that are less than $500,000.And that cut rises to 90% for ransoms higher than $5 million.
[01:06:55] So DarkSide gets the money, right? Cause they'redoing this whole thing. It's a service it's service provided to thebad guys out there, but apparently these affiliates have not beenpaid. Apparently the ransomware as a service provider of didnot honor its commitment and the affiliates, these bad guys, I feelso sorry for them.
[01:07:22] Not they've been asking to be reimbursed from adeposit about a million dollars. The DarkSide was required to makewith this website X access, which is one of these sites on the darkweb, where they are setting up these deals. Okay. So there's threeposts on the site. Where there are plaintiffs who have filedcharges against the defendant against DarkSide.
[01:07:53] So here you go, honor. Amongst thieves, DarkSide didnot honor its financial commitments. It did not pay the bad guys.The ransomed people. Like they were supposed to they've disappearedand apparently their servers have been seized and all haveDarkSides, holdings have been taken. All right. Interesting.
[01:08:19] That's what you get DarkSide disrupted gasolinesupply for the huge swaths of the U S about two weeks ago. And nodoubt, the FBI brought full force of its might onto DarkSide. And Ialso know personally that historically the secret service hasgotten involved too.
[01:08:40]Electric vehicles. We've talked about a lot. I had alot of fun talking about, of course, that great Ford electricvehicle in the first hour of today's show.
[01:08:52] And they've got some cool looking cars, but they'recoming out of everywhere. Now. You've got Italy with a fewmanufacturers that are now right. Pushing out the cars GM of coursehas had them for quite a while. The volt Nissan has had theirs.Ford has a couple, including the Mustang, the new electronicMustang.
[01:09:14] There is some good things to say about them. I lovethe technology myself. I prefer to have something that can go along distance. I can't really have two or three cars right now. Andthey might make a nice little car. If I was commuting just a fewmiles or maybe if it was cheap enough, I would use it to run to thegrocery store.
[01:09:37] But looking at the cost of these vehicles like that,that Ford pickup truck fully maxed out, fully loaded. I looked itup. During the break it's $90,000. That's crazy money. And eventhough it starts at 40,000, well $39,999 95 cents. Even though it'sa $40,000 start. That's a lot of money to pay for a car isespecially with these batteries, there's next generation stuffcoming out.
[01:10:09] That's going to be just phenomenal. That's what I'mwaiting for, but here's part of the problem. We're looking atelectric vehicles and there's so many things to talk about, butelectric vehicles do not pay the taxes that are used to constructour roads and maintain our bridges and our roads.
[01:10:30] There is a per mile tax that is added on by thefederal government and by the state governments. But it isn'tcomputed as a per mile tax. It's computed as an add on to the priceof gasoline and the price of diesel. What they're doing is theyfigure okay your fuel mileage may vary. And they had a big hit, ofcourse, when fuel injectors came into cars, because they basicallydoubled the fuel mileage, but they say, okay, so the average car isgetting 20 or maybe 25 miles a gallon and his pain anywhere fromabout 50 cents to a buck, a gallon in.
[01:11:14] Road taxes and those road taxes are supposed to beused to build new roads, maintain existing roads and bridges by thestates and by the feds. And again, that's a topic for anotherconversation. So how about electric cars? They're not buyinggasoline, they're not buying diesel. So those vehicles are reallyputting a major dent in the road budget for the feds and the stategovernment.
[01:11:46] We've got states like California, Massachusetts, andNew York who want to completely phase out any fossil fuel vehiclesby 2035 and Washington state plans to follow the California rulesand phase out sale of gas powered cars by 2035. But there's a hugehitch in those plans. How do you have these electric vehicles,including that Ford F-150 lightning hit the road?
[01:12:18] Because gas sales will continue to decline along withthe revenue from taxing them. It's a very big deal. So what do youdo while there are some bills that have been moving in? All ofthose states had just named, including Massachusetts, where they'resaying we need to charge people. Per mile when they're drivingwithin our state, how do you do that?
[01:12:48] Charging per mile means, how many miles they'retraveling? You could certainly set up something like easy pass thatcovers the major highways, but the major highways are not whereeveryone's always driving. Think of the state routes we're on allof the time that have no toll ability. And of course, all of theside roads, how do you tax it while there are things that say maybewe use an easy pass type thing only on the bigger roads and we'recharging by the mile.
[01:13:21] That's just going to drive people off of those biggerroads that are meant for traffic onto the side streets. I've seenthat happen before in my own town. There are other things that arebeing proposed that include having the car report on miles drivenwithin a state. So the car would have to have GPS information wouldknow when it has crossed state lines and then keep.
[01:13:51] Tabs on how many miles it drove in the state and
[01:13:55] then
[01:13:56] Craig Peterson: [01:13:56] reportthat to the tax authority for you to be charged. How would that beto have at the end of the year, right? This additional tax burdenbased on how many miles you drove. Yeah, that would be a lot offun. And then there are other proposals while we'll just look atall of the vehicles that are registered in our state.
[01:14:16] So again, in mass it would be when you go in for thatmandatory vehicle check every year at your birthday, we will read.Your car's mileage every year and we'll discharge you by the mile.They don't care if you drove up and down to Florida most of theyear or out to Texas, or most of the year back and forth toCalifornia from mass.
[01:14:40]All of that would be charged against you. So there area lot of debates going on to try and figure it out. How can we makethis work? The feds have a gas tax that hasn't changed since 1993.So the federal gas tax is 18. 0.40 cents per gallon. And then youhave the state taxes and most states have increased their fueltaxes since 2010 to beginning to, to bring in more money and fixthe roads.
[01:15:15] But this is going to be difficult. Some states,including California, Hawaii, Minnesota, Oregon, Utah, and Virginiahave implemented road, user fees. A lot of questions there. It's soeasy to collect a gas tax. It's hidden away in the price of thegasoline. Are they just going to put an extra tax on electricityand say, the average home is using so many kilowatts for their carsand do it that way.
[01:15:43] We really don't know. We just don't know. And ourroads I think, are going to suffer until we figure that whole thingout. We've talked about some of these big hacks. And I was talkingwith a client this week about the whole solar winds hack. And wheredid it come from and what did they do? The solar winds hack.
[01:16:07] It looks like came in through Microsoft exchangeserver. There are a lot of patches out there for exchange server.If you don't have it. Pay close attention, try and figure thatwhole thing out. Okay. It this is a very big deal, but thesereasons, cyber security instances in incident are really a reminderto all of us that public and private sector entities are beingattacked from nation state actors and these big cybercriminals,like what we were just talking about.
[01:16:44] Here's our big question, who was behind the solarwinds hack. Remember we talked about it here. The reports comingout of the federal government in the U S were, that was Russianintelligence was to be hunted it's Poot and blame Puente. Oh no.It's a Russian. Hacker gang, nothing to do with Putin.
[01:17:06]Maybe Putin was, giving them a little bit of a nod, itwas a Russian hacker guy, gang. Things have changed a little bit.They announced here, but Microsoft being there. Microsoft announcedin March that a detected multiple zero day exploits being used toattack the exchange server and a hacker group that they dug half anumb, which operates primarily from least virtual private serversin the U S so think about that.
[01:17:37] And what does that mean least. Virtual privateservers. That's everybody from GoDaddy through Amazon all the wayon out. Everybody now has these virtual private servers and theyalso installed additional malware so they could get long-termaccess to these victims networks. Where do they come from?
[01:18:00]Microsoft wrote in March that half of them operatesfrom China. And this is the first time we're discussing itsactivity. And he called the Chinese hacker group, Microsoft here, ahighly skilled and sophisticated actor that primarily targetsentities in the United States. For the purpose of exfiltratinginformation from a number of industry sectors, including infectiousdisease, law firms, higher education institutions, defensecontractors, policy think tanks and NGOs non-governmentorganizations.
[01:18:37] Now, cause I've talked about it before that we'vebeen called into organizations and D found indications ofcompromise that were coming from China. And that's what it lookslike. It came from a huge attack. It, it hit pretty much every oneof our lives in one way or another through the companies we dealwith.
[01:18:59] But the Biden administration has been silent onattributing the attack to China. They won't say the China was doingthis at all. And they are completely blowing it off. Yeah. All ofthe questions about it. So it looks like it was China that didthis. The Biden administration is unwilling to say it was China forwhatever reason.
[01:19:25] They are very willing to attribute it to Russia. AndI don't know, maybe this is another, yeah. Russia, like we've seenbefore. Hey, everybody, I want to invite you. Make sure you get mynewsletter. When you sign up, I'm going to be sending you somespecial reports on passwords and what to do with yourcybersecurity.
