Tech Talk with Craig Peterson Podcast: DHS outsourcing the Terrorist and No-Fly Lists to Big Tech and Private Contractors, Apple De-Lists Apps and Misuse your Information, Autonomous Vehicle Safety

Welcome!

For all of my listeners who purchased my course on Improving Windows Security - THANK YOU!

We have a whopper of a warning this week about what the Department of Homeland Security is planning under the Biden Administration -- They are going to let Big Tech and Private Companies create the NO-Fly and Terrorist Watch Lists on their behalf -- Scary beyond measure.  Then Apple is doing more to protect your privacy.  We have another hack of a Commercial VPN provider and there is more so be sure to Listen in.

For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com.

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] We're going to be talking about a fender bender in Arizona and when will these autonomous cars be safe, at least measured safe.

We've got a new wave of app store rejections from Apple. That means a couple of things, including better privacy for all of us.

Hello, everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining us today.

This is an interesting question, because we are looking at a future that we assume anyways is going to be full of autonomous vehicles. Why autonomous? What does it mean? There are various levels of autonomous, degrees, if you will. Everything from what we have today in a lot of cars, which is an assist cruise control, that'll keep you a certain distance from the car in front of you.

We've got assisted braking control, where the car notices, Oh, wait a minute. Someone just hit the brakes right in front of you. I should apply the brakes and it hits the brakes even before your foot is pushing down.

Another way to do this is if you slam your foot on the brake, the car assumes you know something that it doesn't, and it increases the force that you're pushing down with. So even though you might just hit the brake fast and not necessarily hard the car will make it hard.

If you think about these types of braking, for instance, you can start to realize where we're running into a problem when it comes to defining whether or not autonomous vehicles are safe.

Bottom line is autonomous vehicles, which are all the way on the other side of this scale, it started with the brakes and now is hopefully going to end with a car that just drives itself. That's everybody's goal, Ford and GM and Chrysler- Fiat, whatever they're called nowadays of course, these autonomous vehicle companies, such as Tesla. We're going to see a way of measuring them that's different than we've ever seen before.

Right now, if you have a motor vehicle, you have a driver's license, most likely. And do you have insurance. Again, most likely and you have insurance because stuff happens. You don't really mean to hit something. You don't mean to wander out of your lane and end up in the woods. Right?

There's a lot of different things that can happen to you, including having another driver get into your way. My wife has been rear-ended. I was rear-ended. She had a beautiful little car, a little MG, and I can tell to this day that she absolutely loved that little car and she used to drive it around and go down to work. I think it was at Baxter Travenol and she'd be driving down there, just having a great time in Southern California. While she was at a stoplight and somebody rear-ended her and totaled her car. Which is just an absolute shame that wasn't her fault. Was it?

I got rear-ended, I've been ruined it, I think two or three times, never to the point that she was at, where the vehicle had major damage, let alone have to be written off, but it happened right.

People aren't attentive. They misjudged the distance. It might be following too close for the conditions, rain or snow or fog or ice. There's a lots of reasons. So we have insurance and we have a driver's license to prove that we indeed at least understand the basics of driving. We passed a test, right? What is it? 70% pass rate, which frankly, isn't such a great rate if you get right down to it.

Anyway, how do we measure these cars? I mentioned the rear end collisions for a very specific purpose. These autonomous cars are racking up millions of miles on roads out West, really California, Arizona is a very popular place for them to be tested because they don't have a whole lot of weather conditions to worry about. The roads are there and they're not changing very much, particularly in Southern California. They've all been built and there's not another square inch that isn't paved, including people's front lawn, which just absolutely boggled my mind.

Why would you have a cement slab for front lawn anyways? That's California for you. These cars driving millions of miles in California are having accidents. They're not having these types of accidents you and I have.

There is a police report that was obtained by the Phoenix new times this last week that revealed a minor Waymo related crash. Now this crash occurred last October and it isn't the only one. This is, kind of, a pattern, but these have not been publicly reported until now. I'm going to read here just a quick paragraph from what the new times in Phoenix had to say, "a white Waymo minivan" Waymo, of course, Google's little spinoff, to make these autonomous vehicles. "A white Waymo mini-van was traveling westbound in the middle of three westbound lanes on Chandler Boulevard in autonomous mode when it unexpectedly breaked for no reason." "A Waymo backup driver behind the wheel at the time told Chandler police that all of a sudden the vehicle began to stop and gave a code to the effect of stop recommended and came to a sudden stop without warning." A red Chevy Silverado pickup behind the vehicle swerved to the right, but clipped its back panel causing minor damage."

No one was hurt. Overall Waymo has a pretty strong safety record. By the way, that was from an article over at ARS Technica. They have more than 20 million testing miles in the Southwest United States. If you think about it. I was adding these numbers up, 20 million miles. My wife and I, we have put well more than a million miles on cars. That's what happens when you have eight kids, right? Over the years you rack it up, 250,000 this car, 300,000 on that car. Yeah. It adds up. That's a lot of miles.

If you start looking at how many miles the average person drives a year and start doing some comparisons with the accident numbers, you'll see really that the autonomous vehicles are having far fewer accidents. Fewer accidents involving a death, which is actually very good, but the accidents it's having, even though they tend to be minor are usually the fault of the other driver. A large majority, in fact of the accidents where these Waymo vehicles, this is according to Waymo, large majority of those crashes have been the fault of the other driver.

So what is the fault of the other driver? Who was at fault here? If that red Chevy Silverado pickup truck hit that Waymo autonomous car, it's the Chevy's fault.

Why did the Chevy do it? It isn't just because he's driving a Chevy or because it's red or a pickup, he hit that car most likely, I don't know, I'm not talking to the guy, but most likely because the car did something unexpected.

If you read again, that police report it saying that even the driver quote unquote, in, in the Waymo car, this white minivan, who's sitting there to make sure the minivan doesn't run somebody over, that driver said, it was all of a sudden it began to stop. It all of a sudden began to stop and gave this code about a stop recommended and stopped with a warning. Put all of those things in a pot and stirred up and what do you have? You now have a different way of driving.

See that Chevy Silverado, if he's a good driver, he's looking ahead right down the road. If you look too close in front of you, you're going to be over-correcting. You're going to be steering all over the place. You're not going to go in a straight line. So with experience, you're looking down the road, two, three, four minimum car lengths ahead. Depends how fast you're going and that's where you're aiming.

You don't see an obstruction in front of that Waymo minivan. So you're not starting to slow down. It's just like I come up to your traffic light there's cars in front of me, and that light is red. I'm not going to be accelerating and then leaning on the brake, like so many people do. I see, there's a red light ahead. There's cars stopped at the light. I'm just going to coast to a stop. Right? Save some energy. You save some brake pads. Stop global warming by not heating up those brake pads.

It's not something most people expect. I've never been rear-ended by doing that, but I've certainly been given the finger for doing that even though I tend to get to the cars in front of me, right? About the time the light turns green.

It's fascinating to look at, but what's going to happen? What is ultimately the way to determine how safe these cars are?

We cannot use the types of assessments that our insurance companies are using. Rear end collisions, like this, rarely get anyone killed. That's where the real high expenses come in. The driver in the back is usually considered to be at fault.

But, what happens when the self-driving cars suddenly comes to the stop in the middle of the road. It's interesting to think about it, isn't it?

Waymo's vehicles sometime hesitate longer than a human would because they have to do all kinds of computations and consider complex situations that they're not used to.

If you've ever written code, say a hundred lines of code. It's going to be in case with cars millions of lines, but out of a hundred lines of code, about 90% of it is for the edge conditions. In other words, things that are unlikely to happen.

So when something weird happens that car's going to hesitate, and that frankly is a problem, the idiosyncrasies of self driving cars.

We're going to talk about a wave of app store rejections by Apple iOS for your iPhone, iPad, et cetera. We'll tell you why right here.

You're listening to Craig Peterson, online Craig peterson.com.

Apple is making another major change in order to give us more privacy. I just started this, Improving Windows Privacy and Security Course. If you using an Apple iOS device, you're halfway there.

Hello, everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for tuning in . You can always hear me online@craigpeterson.com slash podcast.

Apple has been really the only major vendor out there in the smartphone industry to really have security as their prime motivation. Okay, you could argue money istheir prime motivation, right?

Apple has always tried to be secure. The hardware is quite secure. They haven't licensed their operating system to third parties and that gives them control. Like you can't have anywhere else.

Think about all of the different Android-based smartphones that are out there. There are thousands of different models. Within each model, sometimes there are dozens of different hardware configurations. So, Google comes out with a security patch and sends it on out to the vendors, well actually makes it available for the vendors to pick up. Then the vendors go and grab it, and they have to test it, and they have to work in their own code, and then they have to work in all of the device drivers stuff, and they have to package it up.

They have to test it on all of the different models. Just think about Samsung, how many models Samsung has, just by itself, a whole lot of models. It is almost impossible for Android phones to get security patches. Any Android phone that's more than two years old is guaranteed to not get security patches.

I talked last weekend about what Samsung is doing to try and solve this. Finally, they must be listening to the show. Samsung had been more or less supporting it's top of the line models for about two years. If you bought a top of the line Galaxy phone from Samsung or another real top hot model, you might get security updates for a couple of years, and that's kind of it. Forget about it beyond that, which is why I said, if you absolutely must use Android, there's only one vendor you can use in that Samsung.

There's only one model phone that you can buy, which is Samsung top of the line phone, and you have to replace it every two years. So Samsung has come out now and said, We're going to provide support security support for our phones for five years.

So they're trying to compete with Apple here. Apple has long provided support for five years. And as we saw just a couple of weeks ago with this big act of zero day attack against Apple iOS devices. They will actually provide security updates for much longer than five years, but it's way easier to provide security updates for 30 models of phones than it is for a few hundred models, which is what Samsung has. Expect Samsung to narrow down their product line and also to only really be providing support for the top models within their product lines.

Now, here's what Apple is doing right now. Apple is starting to reject some of these apps that have been in the app store for a long time, as well as new apps. They're rejecting them for a couple of reasons. The biggest reason is that as of iOS 14.5, Apple is requiring all of the vendors to tell you when you go to the app store, what information of yours they're storing, they're using, and they're selling. Okay. Pretty big deal. Isn't it? It's pretty bad deal, frankly, when you get right down to it for facebook and others. Facebook took out full page ads in major newspapers in the US saying, Oh, Apple can't do this. This is terrible. It's going to destroy a small business. They said, it's going to destroy small business because Facebook can't pry into our lives as much. You know how it is. People say all the time, they're saying, Hey, I, why am I getting these ads? I've never even searched for it and somehow it's coming up.

There's a number of reasons why, but the bottom line is called big data. These apps like Facebook use all kinds of big data to figure out what we might like and part of that is based on what our friends are searching for. So, it puts together this massive mesh and figures it all out. Something that the Obama campaign really pioneered when Facebook gave them all of the data that they had on everyone and anyone.

I'm sitting here shaking my head because somehow that's okay, but having this Cambridge Analytica company do some of it from a paid standpoint and not get wholesale data somehow that was the most evil thing that ever happened.

They forgot about Obama, but you know, I guess that's political. I criticize both sides of the aisle. I am an equal opportunity criticizer. They deserve it.

We've got Apple now telling Facebook and every other app developer, you have to tell the users. In fact, if you go right now to your phone, your iPad or your iPhone, or the iPod touch, you'll see if you go to the app and you scroll up. You can open a little tab and that tab will all of a sudden become a very big part of the screen because it's tell me what this app is doing with my data. If you don't tell it, Apple's going to block you from the store.

Google has, of course, a bunch of apps. You've probably used them things like Google maps, which I try not to use. Use the Apple maps its gotten much, much better than it was, and they're not tracking you and selling your data like Google does.

Google has its own little app for doing searches. Of course, you've got Google Chrome, all these different things from Google. Google stopped updating their apps on the Apple app store because Apple was telling Google, you have to tell people what your doing with their data. Google didn't want to do it. We just want to update the apps, kind of, loophole that was in this whole thing. They can't not update it forever. Now we're seeing rejections of these developers.

Here is a few lines again from ARS Technica, from a rejection letter that some developers received. "We found in our review that your app collects user and device information to create a unique identifier for the users, devices, apps that fingerprint the user's device in this way are in violation of the Apple developer program license agreement and are not appropriate for the app store."

Now, we're not talking about the fingerprint, as in the fingerprint reader, we're saying that they are looking for unique information about the phone, so they know it's you, they can put it all together. That letter goes on specifically, "your app uses algorithmically converted device and usage data to create a unique identifier in order to track the user."

Apple is really making it clear now to developers. To the ire of Facebook and Google and other companies who rely on that type of tracking to maximize the advertising revenue. I can understand that, right. I really can. It's also clear that this app tracking transparency means that apps that are trying to track you by any means without your consent are going to face rejection.

Bravo to Apple, yet again.

Now I'm not so happy about the statement they made this week. Yeah, Georgia. That's another thing entirely.

Stick around everybody. We will be right back talking more about technology. We're going to talk a little bit about what Google's planning to do in order to help with all of these Android developers and people that are selling them. Carriers, et cetera. How's Google is going to help them with their security updates. This is an interesting way to do it. It's exactly what Apple's been doing.

You're listening to Craig Peterson.

Apple's really gotten into the chip business and it isn't just because they wanted a chip for their iPhone that they could control. In fact, Apple has even gone further and looks like Google's going to do the same.

Hello, everybody. Craig Peterson here.

Google has been an interesting beast over the years. Remember they used to say that their motto was don't be evil. Then a few years ago they removed it from the website and evil seems to be their middle name, a little bit.

One of the things Google has been doing is offering an operating system that can be used and is being used to run almost anything. We're talking mostly, however, about smartphones, certainly by number. That's called Android. Android was a little operating system, of sorts, that was developed by a kid actually Google bought it from him. They have continued to develop on it. It's not a bad little platform. The biggest problems with it really have to do with what I talked about a little earlier, the security, right? Getting the updates.

I mentioned how Apple really has a walled garden. They have their own environment where everything is contained so they can control it all. Google cannot control anything other than the Google pixel phone.

It cannot control what Samsung is doing with the operating system, Android can run on pretty much any chip that's manufactured from Intel chips, through all of these, a little fast chips, these snapdragons and many others that have been used over the years. There's a lot of them.

One of the biggest problems, of course, is the chip set. I've mentioned that Google can come out with an operating system release to fix some security problems, and then those are pushed out, but nothing's done by the carrier or maybe the developer of the handset. What Google's decided to do is make their own walled garden.

If you buy an Apple iPhone, you buy an Apple iPad, or you buy a new Apple Mac, they're all using the same basic chip set that's designed by Apple. They have some fabs where they're making some of these components. Apple has done that so again, they can control it even better. They don't have to pay that exorbitant Intel tax.

Also over at Apple trying to figure out how can we avoid the Qualcomm tax. It isn't just a Qualcomm, you know, I say tax, as in you pay way more for Intel than you would for another equivalent or better chip.

In fact, I have an Apple right in front of me here, an Apple Mac. This is a Mac mini M1 based. It is way faster and cheaper than the Intel version.

You can still get the Intel version of the mini $200 more. There's your Intel tax. And it's about half the speed for some of these things.

For instance, Adobe said that this mac with the Apple chip set in it can be twice as fast as the Mac, same Mac with an Intel processor.

Apple is moving away from not just Intel now, but from Qualcomm. Google wants to move away from Qualcomm. In many of these smartphones, including the pixels, they're using a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip.

The Qualcomm makes a lot of different types of chips. They also tend to make the radio chips that are in our smartphones. The radio chips are used to talk to the cell towers, just send data to send our voice. That's what they're used for.

Apple is hiring developers right now to develop their own chip set. It might not be there for 5G. It might be 6G. In fact, that's what the advertisements for those jobs were about as 6G. But they're going to move away from all of these standard devices that are very expensive and hard to control.

Google is saying the biggest problem we have with making sure that users of the Android operating system get updates is Qualcomm. Interesting, isn't it?

Google is coming out with, what's known as a system on a chip, SOC. What that is, think of the motherboards of years past. One of my first computers was an IBM three 60 30 mainframe, and this thing was huge and not much power. It's just amazing to think about, but it really could sling data around even way back then. It was a nice little computer, if you will. Think about how big that motherboard was. Yeah. It had the main processor. You had the memory controllers, the bus controllers, you had everything right that needed to be there to support it. All of your IO stuff. I might have had serial UARTS built into it, et cetera, et cetera.

A system on a chip is basically you got one chip and that's pretty much all you need. Obviously you got to have memory and you're going to have some sort of storage, other more permanent storage devices, but that's the basics of what a system on a chip is. Google reportedly anyways, that the pixel six is expected to ship with Google custom white chapel is what it's going to be called system on a chip internally.

It's referred to as a GS101. And that GS could be for Google silicone. There's all kinds of people speculating that seems to be the kind of the big one. There is a pixel six in the works. We do know that. Nine to five Google, is a website out there and they've done a lot of little spying on what's going on, but apparently it's a, I'm not going to get into all of the details, but basically it's going to have three CPU cores in it and everything. It's going to be really quite nice. A large arm core for single threaded work loads and three medium cores for multi work.

We've had a problem over the years. How do you make your computer faster? And you can use Intel's approach, which is let's just throw more processors at it. That's great if the software you're using can handle multithreaded environments where you have multiple processors. Okay. You got multiple processors, but how about the access to the memory? What if the process is all one access to the same area of memory at the same time? Then you have to start blocking. It gets very complicated, very fast. Intel chips fade very, very fast. You don't have to get to too many CPU's before all of a sudden the addition of one more CPU cuts the performance of that new CPU by 50%. It really doesn't. It really doesn't take much.

They're all trying to get away from Intel. Many of them have, right? Obviously Google Android phones outside of Google as well have been based on non-Intel hardware for awhile, but they're also now trying to get rid of Qualcomm. And I think that's a good thing. Ultimately, it's going to help out a lot. We're going to see more of this thing in the future, and we're all going to benefit from it, right? With the Google having control over their system on a chip, at least their pixel, it's going to make their life easier, which means if you buy a pixel, you're probably going to be able to get the upgrades better.

Thinking in the back of my mind that maybe Samsung is looking to do the same thing. Maybe Samsung's looking to move away from the Qualcomm chips and move to Google's new system on a chip. I have no idea. I have no inside information, but that would seem to make sense for me, particularly if they want to provide support for years.

By the way, Google is in the embarrassing position of offering less support for Android devices than Samsung, which is now up to three years of major updates, which by the way, is Qualcomm's maximum. Samsung has four years of security updates for some of their devices as well.

Stick around.

You're listening to Craig Peterson.

You can find me online@craigpeterson.com. Don't go anywhere.

You've heard about the no fly list, right? Yeah. How about the terrorist and other watch lists? These lists that people have found it's impossible to get their names off of, even when there was no reason to be there in the first place?

Well, I got some news.

Hi, everybody. Craig Peterson here.

Department of Homeland security has been criticized for many things over the years. One of the things that's been criticized quite a bit about is this watch list that they maintain. They have a watch list for no fly. People get put on that watch list. It was originally intended to be, we know this guy's a terrorist, so we're going to put them on, right.

It's not always the way it goes. It starts out almost innocuous and before you know, it, there's all kinds of people getting caught in this big, big net.

That's what's been happening lately and it's going to get worse because the Department of Homeland security has decided that they are going to hire regular old companies to help develop this no fly list and also this terrorist watch list.

Apparently these companies are going to be looking through all kinds of public data, maybe some private data, social media in order to provide information for this new domestic terror watch list. So you look at that and say, okay, I can see that.

We've talked to before problem, man, 20 years ago, I think I was talking about these data aggregators and the problems they create. Cause they're taking public records, they're putting them all together. They're figuring out how it all meshes together and they come up with a pretty accurate picture of who you are.

Now, I've got to say when I've had them on my show here before I was talking to them and said, okay, I want to look up my own records. So I looked them up on their platforms. I did not see a single one that was more than about 30% correct about me.

Now, this was again, some years ago. I think it's been probably almost a decade since I last spoke with the data aggregators. They really are trying to blend into the background, nowadays. This data that's put together by these artificial intelligence systems is not necessarily that accurate and that gets to be a real problem.

So who is DHS gonna hire? Well, from the description that has been reported on here by the Conservative Tree House, it is going to be big tech, specifically, Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and more.

DHS is going to put them under contracts to hire and organize internal monitoring teams to assist the government by sending information on citizens, they deem dangerous again, what could go wrong?

Our government is not allowed to spy on us. How many times have we talked about this? You have of course the five eyes and then they added more and more. These are governments that spy on each other's citizens for each other.

So for instance, US cannot spy on US citizens. So we have an arrangement with the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, to spy on the US citizens for us that makes sense to you. Can you believe that?

We spy on their citizens for them and they spy on our citizens for us and all is good.

What's happening here is The Department of Homeland security realizes it cannot spy on us directly. This is what they've been doing for very long time, they go to the data aggregators and they pull up the data that they want.

They want to see if this guy maybe selling illicit drugs and they pull up public records. What cars does he have? How many homesdo they own? Who's he dating? Has she all of a sudden been buying diamonds and mink coats? What's going on here?

So now we're seeing that the US intelligence apparatus. It's really now going live quickly, to put together lists of Americans who could be potential threats to the government and need to be watched.

Now it's all well, and good. It's just like president Biden this week saying, Oh, we're going to have these red flag laws. We're going to stop the sale of certain types of firearms and things. It all sounds good. The reality is we have known about some of these people before, right? This is all just a red herring that the federal government is doing right now because the real problem is these terrorists, the domestic and otherwise that have shot up schools have almost always been reported to law enforcement as dangerous people. Some of them have even been on lists that say they cannot buy firearms, and yet they get firearms. Bad