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Good morning everybody!

I was on with Matt this morning and we had a good discussion about my recommendations for the type of security software, ransomware, 5G, and the cost of TV now.  Let's get into my conversation with Matt on WGAN.

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

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

Here's what I kind of recommend for people. If you are going to get some of the software, here's what I say you should get. First of all. Well, that was me this morning on WGAN radio, talking with Matt about, again, this week's hot topics, and if you're wondering who I am, I'm Craig Peterson, but here we go with Matt.

Seven 36 WGAN morning news. Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us now and he needs to turn down his radio. Cause I can hear my voice.

That was odd, I don't have my radio on.

A little echo there. Maybe we'll say so let me start off Craig, with a question about YouTube TV. I, I use YouTube TV. I'm a big fan of YouTube TV. And, it's been a decent price for me, not anymore though. Right? Yeah. A lot of us have been looking to, how can we cut back on our costs here? Cable TV was creeping up 50, 70, over a hundred dollars a month.

And all people looked at this whole cost-cutting thing as a, you know, let's go on the internet. We can just get it cheap and you certainly could, but what we're starting to see now is a split-up of stuff. For instance, our friends over at Disney have decided to pull the Marvel universe from its competitors, because it now has Disney plus that it wants to charge you 10 to 15 to $20 a month for all these different services.

Right. There's a plus there's Netflix. Peacock is coming up as NBC. CBS has theirs and YouTube has now. Taking the price of their we've kind of equivalent to the basic cable and has hiked that price by 30%. So if you're a brand new customer, you can expect to pay $65 a month for YouTube television service from here on out.

Now they've added some more channels in there. They've picked up CBS Viacom family of cable TV networks. But this is getting to the point now where, who knows cable might be cheaper, but. There is something on the horizon that might help us all out. And that is five G. This is where we could be kind of a savior because right now you're paying the cable company for the internet.

Anyways, most of us, right? Some of us might have DSL from the telephone company, which is not particularly fast. Some of us have the satellite service, which again is not particularly fast, but with five G that's going to reach even the smaller towns and cities eventually here. It's certainly not going to reach out in the middle of nowhere, but with five G we're going to have a platform that allows people to deliver very, very specific programming.

So. My fingers are crossed, Matt, that hopefully with 5g coming out. We are going to see a huge change in that we can just get whatever we like. You know, we can't watch the NFL anymore after their announcement this week, but, you know, maybe just watch the Red Sox or, or watch the games you want to watch rather than have to buy these bundles like YouTube $65 a month bundle.

Hmm, we are talking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us at this time every week to go over. What's going on in the world of technology. Craig, I know that a lot of people are still worried about viruses on their computers. And so they oftentimes will try to get a. The free version of antivirus software or whatnot, but, there's a lot of reasons, perhaps not to do that and do instead pay for an antivirus software program.

Why is that? 

Yeah, there are a lot of free programs out there and I've used many of them over the years. I don't want to confuse people. I mentioning some of the ones that I've used, but the free versions are exactly that they're free there to try and get you going. The features that you get when you pay for the software, really add up pretty quickly.

Some of them have these anti-phishing features, some of them will even filter your email, looking for phishing attacks, which are really huge right now. And usually carry ransomware. It's on the increase. I'm afraid to say, but they include various other things that are going to help you out bank security, password managers, et cetera.

Here's what I kind of recommend for people. If you are going to get some of the software. Here's what I say you should get. First of all. Use what's already on your machine. So if you're a Windows user, use the software that came with Windows - Windows Defender, make sure it stays up to date.

Make sure it stays on. Another thing. This is kind of hard to do. I'll have to do a course on this, but lock down your computer. You can do this manually through the Windows firewall, unfortunately by default. Microsoft has too many services turned on. So turn off services you don't need and use Bit Defender. Get the paid version of Bit Defender. None of this is a hundred percent, but working together, you're going to get about an at this point about a 90% effectiveness and one more thing to get, and that's open DNS.

Get the paid version. There are family versions. That'll help keep your kids safe online as well, away from the things maybe say shouldn't be seeing online, but the open DNS can cost you a few bucks as well.

But those three things together, Matt, is going to save you from about 98% of all of the nastiness online.

Ooh, that's all quite a bit. we're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over the world of technology. A final question for you here, Craig. the biggest threat that we experience out there online right now seems to be ransomware.

Is that getting worse?

Yeah, it's absolutely getting worse and we've gotta be careful here. The FBI has been warning us about the increases in it. We've got all these security companies talking about it as well. Just last week, there's a new wave of ransomware attacks against large organizations. It was identified in 31 large businesses.

Now, part of the reason it's identified there is they have security teams that are keeping an eye out for you as a small business. There's a home user. You're not going to report because you're not going to stop it. It's just going to be after the fact, hopefully, you have a good backup, frankly. But these attackers and breach the networks of these 31 different large businesses, and we're laying out the groundwork for their attacks.

It's kind of interesting in the way they do it, so I won't get into it. Now we might talk about it again on, on Saturday during my show. The bottom line of ransomware is easier for the bad guys to do than ever before. We are clicking on more stuff than ever before because of the whole COVID thing. We want to know what's going on and we get an email, we click on it.

So be very, very careful. Don't click on links to sites that you are not a hundred percent sure of. If you want to find out about COVID-19. There are a couple of sites you might want to go to. Some people go to the world health organization, but of course, you can go to cdc.gov and get all of the facts as we're being told, anyways. Just don't click on these emails, because ransomware is really nasty stuff.

Good advice. It says always Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us on Wednesdays at this time to go over the world of technology. You can hear him on this very station, Saturdays a one, because he goes into all these stories and more in greater depth.

Craig, thanks as always for joining us. And we'll talk to you again soon.

Thanks, Matt. Take care of, appreciate it.

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