Crucial Tech

There is important stuff in tech, and then there is stupid stuff. And lately the stupid stuff has been a bit more interesting. We take a look at four or the more interesting stupid stories.

For about 10 years the conventional wisdom about #ransomware was to just pay it and start improving your security. According to John Flory III, CISO for Harbor Networks, that just doesn’t work anymore. In our interview with Flory he explains why it is absolutely necessary to go on offense now and hunt the hackers down. He gives us a preview of a case he worked on with international law enforcement...

As soon as the SolarWinds breach hit the news, press releases started pouring out of the cyber security industry with claims that their products or services would have prevented the breach, but talking to people in the trenches, that is a dangerous claim to believe. The truth is, human error and intention can defeat any security protocol or technology. We talked to Matthew Rosenquist and Steve Han...

We were going to do this after the first, but the queue is getting long with 2021  interviews and articles for Cybersecurity-Magazine.com so here's our Christmas gift to you. Legislation, litigation, public opinion and technology are combining in 2021 to put the breaks on #disinformation and #Trumpism next year and the foreseeable future. It looks bad for social media but good for print journ...

Before we get into be thankful of stuff on Thursday we need to get one thing off of our chest, namely the wasteful use of time and money spent on corporate awards programs that are nothing more than a naked attempt to build valuable mailing lists and take money from startups that they can't afford or leave them  vulnerable to a corporate raider. And there are no more blatant efforts than the...

President-elect Joe Biden has been catching flack for stating that we will transition out of fossil fuel in favor of green energy, but that has less to do with government regulation and more to do with market forces. And in the case of hydrogen, we cannot decouple that clean energy from fossil fuel extraction. We look at this in a short podcast because it is that simple.

In part three of this series, we take a look at the debate over Section 230 in Title II of the Federal Communications Act that is targeting social media political bias and discuss why it is a misdirected controversy, and how it might restore the fortunes of and trust in #MSM. We will conclude the series with a couple of tools to help you create your own mental filter on what you see online.

In part two of our miniseries on journalism in a digital world, we take a look at the causes of bias in the press. Some of that is legitimate, but a lot of it is just personal perception and crowd think. The bias most of us see is actually a mirror image of our own. We talk about some of the ways you can combat bias but we admit it may be beyond one's desire to seek balanced news. THERE WILL BE A...

It is popular to say you don't trust the news media. Some of that distrust is valid, but few people can actually identify why. Joe Basques and I decided to do a deep dive into the subject in this episode... that went so long we had to make it a multiparter. There may even be a part 3. In this day and time we need all the help we can get to find the truth and randomly cutting off reliable sources o...

Next week, on Crucial Tech, more about journalism and digital content than you've ever known.

I have talked to a lot of companies developing digital security devices and systems. Virus scans catch about 50 percent of the attacks at best but don't stop them from happening. Network equipment and software services are way too expensive and do very little to protect against people doing stupid things behind the firewall. It has really seemed hopeless for a while and very frustrating. Then I ra...

Bob Frankston is an e engineer whose work has arguable been more responsible for how most people interact with the internet. You probably have never heard of him... but I have. After following Bob Frankston's IEEE column off and on since 2013 we were thrown together earlier this year on social media and was absolutely star struck when he agreed to this interview about 5G networks. As I suspected,...

Even the most security-conscious people and organizations get hacked, so it's not always something you can stop. We go back to talk with #Sectigo's VP of IoT security, Alan Grau to talk about how a security training from got hacked through a common phishing scam, how deep the flaws in our technology are and finally, how Sectigo is helping companies make secure technology.

Between January 1 and August 23, The number of phishing sites detected by Google rose by more than 200,000 to 1,892,980. Three years ago there were less than 560,000.  “When you get that all too familiar barrage of spam emails, social engineers are betting that if you’re a MAGA supporter who received spoofed emails pitching progressive candidates or causes, you’ll click unsubscribe about as f...

We have a few episodes this month talking about drastic changes in advertising and marketing and until this week, it looked like everything was under control... until Facebook admitted this week that the changes are going to severely hamper their ability to send those creepy targeted advertising posts your way. And that's going to affect their revenues.

You have probably seen notifications during web searches the tell you that the website you are visiting will use “cookies” to “give you a better search experience.” or some sort of nonsense, and you click “OK” just to get on with it. You might know what cookies are, other than a delicious snack, but most people don’t. In this episode, we are going to tell you what they are, how they work, and why...

You may have heard of quantum computers. You may actually think they are mostly hype. They are. We won't see them come into real use for a decade. In the meantime, people are freaking out over how they can be used to makes us all less safe.  The good news is some companies, like Sectigo, are working on ways to make sure we are all safe when they actually become a reality. So grab a coffee and...

We have the means and ability to take this pandemic down to nothing, but we all need to cooperate, be smart about it, and be ready to give up things that don't really exist, like #privacy. #Contact_tracing needs the cooperation of companies like #Google and #Apple even if it means they let us know exactly how much data they are collecting on us. Let's face reality and get out of this alive

In our last episode we reported on presentations at BlackHat USA 2020 about election interference. In this second part, we look specifically at the Russian and Chinese approaches to disinformation campaigns and how it is less technology hacking and more about strategic use of social media.

Our first re-run of the season is going back to our report on election hacking, a two-parter, that doesn't dwell on the technology of elections as much as how they can be influenced. For several years we have heard about how technologically vulnerable our elections systems are, but it turns out that physically hacking a system is a lot harder and yields insignificant fruit in national elections. I...

Are you concerned about how social media seems to know exactly what you are thinking about? Are you’re that they are listening to you and your friends on mobile devices? Well, they don’t and they aren’t. You’ve been freely telling them what your concerns are and what you want to buy. But all that may be coming to an end.  Find out how in the next episode of Crucial Tech.

We thought we would be able to wrap up the last three episodes featuring Tim Bajarin and Matthew Rosenquist, but then life happened and more AI disasters occurred. This is yet another launching point for our coverage of surveillance technology.

Last week, we had @TimBajarin give a fairly pessimistic view of the future of #AI and #facial recognition. This week we bring in the positives (sort of) with security and AI guru @MatthewRosenquist. This technology is probably inevitable but to make it a global issue we are going to either have to give up some freedom and privacy, or we are going to have to work hard to fix the deficiencies. eithe...

By the time we finished last week's episode on security settings a lot happened. So I started making some calls to those who know what was going on. This week, we talk to the Analyst di tutti Analysts, Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies about ethics, facial recognition and AI, why it's so hard to do any of that well, and how Apple's announcement of iOS 14 is so earth-shaking.

My business partner, Joe Basques called me up and started asking questions about #Facebook security, which morphed into #AI, which moved into #facial_recognition. So we decided to start from the beginning of the conversation and record it. You will find out some tricks about how you can make your Facebook experience safer, what Facebook can actually track even when you think you are secure, and wh...