Help Us Welcome (Back) Dwight!

On today's podcast, the PTG talks with their newest tech, Dwight, about not only his past experiences but also what he has learned along away.

With over 30 years of IT/Cybersecurity/MSP experience (which includes working with PTG over a decade ago), we know he will add a lot of value to the team... We are thrilled to welcome him back!

Hosts: BJ, Blake & Erin
Guest: Dwight

Support the show - Call 877-468-2721 or visit https://petronellatech.com

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Transcript

Erin: 0:38

so welcome everybody to another episode of the PTG podcast. Unfortunately, Craig will not be with us today. He is actually out for the week. He's spending some time with his family fortunately for him. So today it's going to be myself, Erin. We also have Blake and BJ, and then we have a special guest who will hopefully be becoming a regular on the show. We have Dwight. He is our oldest newest tech, but I don't mean old as an age. So he worked at PTG a while ago. Now he's back again. So Dwight do, and tell us a little bit about yourself?

Dwight: 1:14

Sure. I've worked for Petronella before, back in 2010. So this is my second engagement. And basically I come professionally from a systems administrator role. And I've been doing that now for the past 30 years. So I've worked for a myriad of different companies. Most of the managed service providers throughout north America, I actually through the world and I have a glass half full mentality, so I try to keep that open front all the time. And I like technology and working with people.

Erin: 1:39

Yeah, welcome back. We're definitely glad to have you here.

Dwight: 1:42

Thank you.

Blake: 1:43

So you were long before our time here, for sure. Tell us what it was like to work for PTG back then. I'm sure a lot's changed, obviously.

Dwight: 1:49

The company was, relatively new because Craig's been in business now for 20 years. Going from a break fix at the time of your managed service provider type of perspective. And there was a lot of work a lot of the customers back then that I'd seen now. And so they stuck around, PTG has been doing a good job otherwise they wouldn't still be there. I remember the demands work to a really heavy at the time a lot of after hours stuff. But the best thing was even Craig, I found very easy to work with. Very understanding. If you put your time, he never micromanages. It was just a great guy to work for. That's why I came back second time.

Erin: 2:18

Again, welcome. We're very glad to have you,

Blake: 2:21

Certainly glad to have you back.

Dwight: 2:23

Glad to be back.

Erin: 2:23

So today BJ found an interesting article for us to talk about where a cyber security analyst stole nearly$600,000 in crypto currency from a client. That's a lot of money.

BJ: 2:38

Which is exactly how you don't stay in business for 20 years as a cyber security firm.

Erin: 2:42

Exactly. I think if we were stealing crypto from our clients, it would already be known by now. That'd be my guess.

BJ: 2:48

So, yeah, this is an interesting space, cybersecurity. It's very important to not only get a trusted cybersecurity partner vetted, but also to start to try to bridge that gap of understanding, each man and woman themselves to try to understand cyber a little better since we're so reliant upon it.

Dwight: 3:05

Yeah. And getting people familiar with the different acronyms so they don't feel name shock, too, because IT has a way of evolving all these new acronyms and names. So put a more human name to it.

BJ: 3:15

Why don't we jump right into that? Cause that's something near and dear to my heart, Dwight. Cause I'm firmly of the viewpoint that some of this stuff is too complicated a lot of the names that are used. It's the same thing with science and technology, engineering and math, all kind of fit that same problem. Some of the lingo and the names applied to everything is, where a lot of the confusion stems from. Since you have such an extensive background in it. I think this is a great time for us to dive right in and start to remove some of that murkiness.

Dwight: 3:42

Sure. Let's take that. Cyber refers to space or something that's virtual, so basically overtaken a mode is anything that's connected to the internet or outside of your space, would it be your internet connection? Remote services that you're using for work. Could be home related, but because we're a business we're speaking mostly to the business world, and then everything's connected between the two. A fancy word for internet connectivity and connected devices. That are virtual, not at premises, they might be at another data center, but you connect remotely to them from your home or from your business. I think that would simplify things for our listeners.

BJ: 4:17

I'm sitting here myself personally, after hearing you say that, just dumbfounded. I'm like, why am I almost 44 years old, and I've never heard it explained simply like that?

Erin: 4:24

You do have a really great way of doing that, Dwight.

BJ: 4:26

Yeah. This stuff is too confusing for people. And that's a perfect way to explain what all this is. Everyone's using this term metaverse now, but no one's realizing that we've been using this virtual cyberspace, hyperspace, for all this time, you know?

Dwight: 4:40

And it keeps things simple, I call a lot of that stuff geek speak. That means that, only in the IP worlders. Even I have a difficult time with these new acronyms and names that have come out. I got to think a little bit, what are they referring to? So it's challenging for even us IT people let alone for this business owners and just regular, employees that have to use the technology. It can be confounding to them, especially management too. Management got the business of running a business. They don't have the time, or inclination probably to learn all this stuff. Usually we go to a boss, just tell me what it means in real terms, bottom line. Then you got to be able to convey that to them. and I have lots of experience doing that because you have to speak to customers at their level of understanding.

BJ: 5:17

Yeah, where do the complicated terms come from?

Dwight: 5:19

I don't think somebody does it intentionally, but some people just don't think about, when they're coming over into new acronyms I think IT is constantly trying to evolve itself and come up with new things. Most of the stuff that people speak about nowadays: cybersecurity. I call it best practices. Security in general, it's just best practices. Password strength. Don't stick your password on a sticky note, put it on your monitor. Don't put it on your keyboard. I call it good hygiene. That's what a lot security is it just, common sense approach to what you can do in your environment to prevent people from getting information. And or getting into things. For instance, looking at your email, for a sense of fishing. They're going to have policies and they can do a lot in user training, is very important for companies to do, especially nowadays with all the fraud that's happening out there. People have to be educated, once they're educated it empowers them, and then they don't feel so daunted and panic whenever they see something because now everybody's ringing the bell, right? Cyber security, phishing, fraud! Companies losing money, people losing jobs. So, it scares a lot of people. To get people more comfortable with that environment you have to empower them, give them some knowledge and say, okay, I've seen this before. I know what this looks like. I can address this here on my own. I think we mentioned that earlier today. And I think that's important because if people are not comfortable in the Herbert stuff, they either put their head in the sand or they panic or whatever the case may be.

Erin: 6:32

That's a really good point and another point, too, Dwight. I remember it was probably back in 2008, 2009, something like that. I lived in Portland, Oregon at the time. And my boyfriend at the time was super into computers. Still is, as far as I'm aware, but he let me borrow his computer. And I borrowed it and then I probably downloaded a virus on it or something. I don't know, but after he got it back for me, he was like, yeah, these things aren't working. I think you probably downloaded something you shouldn't have or clicked on something. And I was like, I didn't do that. I would never do that. But now looking back at it. Yeah, I probably did because how was I supposed to know? I had no idea. I didn't know how tricky these little hackers were. It was really eye-opening to learn all their different tactics.

BJ: 7:16

Yeah, what's eye opening, too, is to see how advanced some of the tactics are getting. If you picture the two ends of the spectrum, the hackers are getting so sophisticated with how they attack. And then on the other end of the spectrum, it's really shocking to me to see just how careless people still are. On social media you see an abundance of links being shared and people click them just freely and I'm like, whoa, what are you doing?

Erin: 7:41

Now that we know it's definitely scary. What are you doing? One of my friends, she has this friend who has now twice move states to be with somebody she met online and she got. Catfish both times. It's sad though. it's like, how do you not see that this person is clearly trying to scam you? I don't know. Maybe they'll start doing that. Maybe we'll start teaching basic cybersecurity in high school and maybe middle, at a young age.

BJ: 8:08

That would be a really good idea. A lot of the things that you wonder why they don't teach in a school, the benefits of yoga, for example. But I never heard about them. That's how I became a old lady.

Erin: 8:17

You're not an old lady. If you're all that means I'm old. You're not old, BJ. No, but yeah, that is a good point. Maybe they will start doing that. I feel like you have to. I remember taking typing classes. That was a long time ago now, but you just wonder when they're gonna start. They're probably slow to change the curriculum and things like that. It's really not going to keep up, is it? We need to do a better job. Teach those children not to get scammed.

Blake: 8:40

Too, with the rise and computer usage and things like that. They were teach basic cybersecurity courses in high school or coming up. I know that they would teach computer graphics, we had a computer education course. They were teaching us basic HTML. And the teacher was absolutely terrible. she didn't know anything about HTML. So whenever something happened or she needed some advanced feedback, she would call me up and I would come up and help her. It was just a teacher, I think, that got appointed the responsibility. Cause she may have not been a good math teacher or something. But anyways, you think that that would be something super useful that they should teach, like basic cyber security, how to use a computer, how not to get hacked or how not to be compromised.

Erin: 9:19

Yeah, like I said, sometimes it just takes awhile to catch up. It's just all a lot of red tape, I would imagine. I guess you think about it, too. it's hard to find a cyber security person just in general. So I imagine finding a cybersecurity teacher that actually knows what they're talking about would also be difficult, but it would probably be smart, especially cause there's computers at school and you don't have internet access.

Dwight: 9:39

I think there's a lot of teachers. We'll go back to defining cybersecurity. There's lots of people that have good IT hygiene. So I guess once you break cyber down into it, basically it could be a security administrator, a security analyst, or something like that. That's more of the names. Now, systems administrators are also cyber security specialists too, because that's a part of their job. And a lot of the IT guys don't like educating people or they don't like doing that type of thing, but I think there's quite a few of them that do. And they educate their internal workforce or internal employees and staff. And also then they probably would do meetings with a client to ponder request to do it. Not all people are like that, but I think there's a fairly good balance of them in the IT world, from what I've experienced that are willing to educate people.

Erin: 10:24

There is a stereotype, obviously with it guys of being notoriously grouchy. But I don't think that's always the case. Dwight, like we were just saying now, you are really good at breaking things down and explaining it in ways that we can understand it. So I think that's awesome. Maybe you should be a high school teacher.

BJ: 10:42

but that's a funny thing to say, Erin, too, about IT guys being so grumpy because probably a lot of people have felt that way. But if you think about it, there's probably a large degree of frustration on the part of IT people, right?

Erin: 10:53

It has to be annoying.

BJ: 10:55

Yeah, cause that gap of understanding is so big between IT guys and non-IT people that after a while it has to just probably be really wearing on the nerves. I would assume.

Erin: 11:05

I would imagine as well.

BJ: 11:07

Maybe you could tell us about that, about why it is that you guys become so grumpy.

Dwight: 11:12

I think a lot of it is the workload, too. Right? So, that can be a major impact on guys. And then some people just don't have the personality. I have a friend who I went to college with, who is like a super brain. You could give him a trig question or trigonometry or a math problem or a business problem. And he needs to sit there in front of a couple of seconds or a minute or two, and he can put it together in his head. So here you go. Here's the solution, and write it out, just like that. Now, on a personal side, he had poor social skills. It was more of a recluse, So we have those personalities. Companies need those guys because are they're on the bleeding edge and they're just so good with math and logic, but he would have a difficult time conveying stuff to a class He evolved as a person. I remember when he was younger, he was at now he's working with with IBM higher up now. So I'm sure he's evolved because he had to get social skills, but a lot of people don't have the social skills. That's what it is. so, those are developed, So that would be the big factor. And then, like I said, workload. some people are just overworked and they don't look at end user training as a priority in their world. And that's why some of them are grumpy or uncooperative.

Erin: 12:15

People do the same, thing. And it's different people doing the same thing over and over again though. And you're like, just don't click on a link or whatever it is that they do. And you're like, just don't do that. Does that, factor into it sometimes?

Dwight: 12:28

Yeah, too. That's what it comes down to, I think, when any company or business is to have an acceptable use policy that all users have to contend with, and that may involve training too. And stuff that's required. Like you can say upon a new employee. Coming onboard here, you have to complete these courses, And these are critical things to the functionality for your role and for the business in general. And then once you sign off on those things and the company thinks that you understand, and you know what they have to do in these circumstances. And then a user has to take responsibility or an employee. You have to take responsibility. your environment. So, personal responsibility, proper education. And then if somebody has steps inside that safe this company and you say you've had repeated times where this particular use, and I've seen this where a user messes stuff up for a phishing attack or whatever, and they knew what they do, then they have to be dealt with by the company. And it's not that you're indifferent to the company, but you have to set a boundary, right? You do that once, okay. You do it twice, it's not so okay. If you do three times, you're at the door.

Erin: 13:25

Right.

Dwight: 13:25

So personal responsibility. Your function as an employee, you have to have a certain level of autonomy. I think all businesses now are looking towards that. They want their comforter, their employees to own their workspace. And it's not hard. It's not difficult if it's given to people properly, the thing is you have to give them proper education. So you can't put step three before step one, and you have to order it out nicely. Especially if these people, like an accountant. Some accounts are good with IT, some are not. It depends on what their background is. So how do we deal with all these people? Well, then you speak to them as if they don't understand it, or they have no knowledge on what you're talking about. So you keep it low. You keep it simple and you use step on our checklist. Checklist one checklist two, checklist three. Everybody can follow a checklist.

Erin: 14:06

Yeah, very good point. I like your Zen way of going about IT. I think that's fantastic. And I personally, haven't had a lot of problems like IT people being grouchy. I just know that that's a bit of a stereotype.

Dwight: 14:18

I think you considered all factors into. Most IT people are very open to help. Most people are very professional, very cooperative, want to help. And like I said, if these mitigating factors like overworking and what their expectations are and basically defining the role and what they may or may not be called out to do or established upfront, and then they just. Adapt to their environment. But like I said, some companies don't. They have this, I call it dysfunctional IT family, or business in general where nobody knows what the right hand is doing. Everybody's kind of off doing their own thing. That can be a real challenge that way too. It's about team environment, having a positive atmosphere and wanting to make the company and its environment with the best that you can contribute.

Blake: 15:01

I seem too, with some companies in Raleigh, they have maybe about 10,000 plus employees and they have four IT guys,. One of our clients, I think they have maybe four or five IT guys. So, things like that, I think, can obviously lead to grouchy IT guys.

BJ: 15:17

That's a good point because people don't understand the complexity of what IT even is. And even to lay a network and to network all the computers together in an office and to get it all working, just that right there is a ton of work.

Blake: 15:30

Not only that too, maybe I can speak for myself, but IT is not sexy. Jokes aside, all the people that I know that went through high school with, they're in finance or they're going to be doctors or airplane pilots. I was reading an article, in the forties and fifties, being an airplane pilot was the most prestigious role that you could have. So there's a shortage of good IT workers. There's just not enough of us.

Erin: 15:51

Yeah. There is a shortage. I think I might've even did an article on this, but. I'm trying to really get people more into IT and cybersecurity. Cause there's not enough for you guys around.

Blake: 16:02

Because there's such a shortage in IT, they had to create a business model that can support customers. For example, I know some ISP that have a staggered help desk where they have a tier one, tier two and tier three. So tier ones are literally just hands for hire people that know how to use a keyboard. And they're giving basic instructions as to, Hey, here's how you troubleshoot. Here's how you do this. Here's how you do that. And then anything beyond turning the device on and off, they submit it to tier two and then tier two is a guy that knows a little bit of some basic IT, maybe he's worked at the help desk at tier one for a certain period of time. He has some tenure and yada, yada, yada. And if he can do it then tier three and then, if tear three can't do it, then it gets to somebody like Dwight who's like, okay, why am I working on this? Because there's such an overwhelming demand for IT and support that they have to stagger it this way.

Dwight: 16:47

That's true. And right now, I think across the globe in general IT is a very taxed environment right now. We've got a lot of burnout going on. We've got a lot of people, even the loot, leaving the industry because of this past couple of years. Over time and a demand. Moving to a virtual environment, the demands have increased I would say double internal corporate it, if not more. So that's a big factor.

Blake: 17:09

So hold on. I guess maybe I didn't get the clarity that I needed. Virtual environments that's working from home or people that are using virtualization?

Dwight: 17:16

Virtual environment or I'd just say work from home environment. Maybe that's a better terminology to use. People have been pushed out of the office to work from home. So people have gone to work from homes that poses a major IT work around because most times, most companies that deal with VPNs and stuff like that. Mobile users. There's only for a few users and is configured for that purpose and for that amount of people. So now all of a sudden you're going from, maybe we can use it in a company of say a hundred to 85 or more users. And for the assault, basically you have to look at issues like company bandwidth, right? So internet bandwidth, and what is the internet? Bandwidth will basically stop. Your business pipe, like your internet pipe. So for all of a sudden, now everything was flowing nicely. Now we have 85 new users and the connections are slowed are dropping. So you have to upgrade your van with the office. Also internal resource usage goes up to, it might be on your internal SharePoint on your internal remote desktop server. And so all these factors, then all of a sudden are kind of hitting at one time. So, because basically it was like, okay, everybody's got to stop coming to the office. It wasn't triple thing or trickle effect where we can do it over time. And it was a dead stop and everybody had to stay home. and then people are sending new pieces of hardware. So the IT departments trying to manage all this different stuff. So, people are getting requisition for new harbors going out. A lot of times it was not not enough time to prep the new laptops and all that stuff to their employees. A lot of stuff had to be done manually, remotely, So that poses a challenge as well. A lot of people That were working from home, they're not actually in the city. So they had very poor internet service. Maybe they were out on a farm or maybe they're out in the country somewhere where they don't have a great internet service provider. That poses multiple levels of complexity. and then of course having to work around all that stuff,

Blake: 18:56

That was probably the hugest IT boom. I think it's probably January of 20 20, maybe once COVID hit, snapping their fingers within a matter of seconds, people were like, okay, the offices are shut down. What do we do? Everybody's working from home. How do we transition into this as quickly as possible? People that weren't prepared for it.

Dwight: 19:14

And that's the way it happened. It wasn't a dead stop. Everybody stopped at the waiting list and it's probably never going to be back to normal. And now I would say, from my observations of things, remote work now is a very popular thing. A lot of people look the freedom. I haven't spoken to very many people who don't like working from home.

Blake: 19:30

Yeah, in my generation, I'm 31, so, I'm never going to an office skin.

Erin: 19:34

I think I got my first work from home job. I worked for a nonprofit credit counseling agency, and they sent me home maybe eight months after I started working there. And then I worked from home for four years and I got laid off. And let me tell you, going back into the office was a challenge after four years of working from home, it was not fun. We had a small IT department. I might have only had one person, actually, but she was really good. And she's made sure that everything was set up properly but whenever we went home, it took time to be able to do that because they had to make sure everything was set up and all this stuff. I remember we wrote a lot of blog articles on that too, when it first happened, because that was a big concern that everybody was going to go home really quickly. And nobody's going to be prepared. And the hackers know this, obviously, obviously that hackers also have no shame. So of course, they're going to try to use that to take advantage of whatever vulnerabilities that they can. I really think they did. They did a really good job. There was a big increase in 2020 and 2021 of hacks successful.

Dwight: 20:39

They seized on the opportunity for sure. And I'm of course, I'll call it criminals do. It's just in general, one to add to riots, in all the state and all the different cities across the U S people just smash and grab smash and grab, right. So same deal. Same thing.

Blake: 20:51

Not only that too, but immediately COVID was ravaging through China and a lot of the networking equipment was made in Asia or abroad. And obviously this factories have been shut down and then boom, COVID hit here. So not only was there an immediate demand for how to secure home networks, but a shortage of actual networking equipment

Erin: 21:11

That was a big old mess. It's just like right for it to be taken advantage of.

Dwight: 21:15

When criminals see opportunities, they're opportunistic, right. They're just like salespeople. They see an opportunity and they go for it. So they have a different mindset than most normal people will. But they see an opportunity to say, oh yeah. Oh okay. I'll just set up a website, and it all looks legit and everybody seems so sympathetic. And then they send money to this fund or whatever. So they prey on them and that's always been that way and it always will be. And it's just now moved into the internet realm as opposed to getting flyers and brochures in the mail and stuff like that.

Blake: 21:43

Speaking of opportunistic, I literally was just on the podcast and I posted it in our teams chat. But somebody sent me a text message saying, oh, log into your T-Mobile account, dah, dah, dah. And of course once the first thing you do is you get an auto text message or you try the word stop cause you don't want it to keep coming. And then next thing you know, a blue bubble pops up cause I have an iPhone, so it was sure enough an i-message. And then I just said I couldn't help, but laugh. I was like, this is the worst scammer attempt I think has ever been tried on me. And then I just was like, yeah, first of all, don't even have T-Mobile, and then all of a sudden I'd get a red message that they read my text message. Come on, guys, get more creative if you're trying to scam me.

Dwight: 22:22

You got to understand there's nothing free only probably getting a cold or flu. When does that flash assign comes up free, there's always some conditions too. Especially if they were in the digital world or the paper world or whatever.

Blake: 22:34

It's a hard thing to understand that your data is worth so much money. your data is everything to Facebook and Google and Microsoft.

BJ: 22:42

Yes. It really is, which is kind of sick in a way, because your data really defines you as a person. So it's kind of like owning the person because your data truly does define you.

Blake: 22:52

We can literally lead into that, but there's a Netflix thing, I can't remember what it's called, but I can look it up again. They were talking about how your data can tell you everything you need to know about you, your persona and they can influence you and your buying habits and your patterns and in the way that you feel politically about a certain political candidate or this or that, or whatever, they can influence a lot of the decisions that you make on a day-to-day basis based upon the data points that they have on you. I can't remember how many points it was. It was like 5,000 data points, or I don't even know, something crazy.

Erin: 23:25

It's just so creepy to think that they do that. It's the same thing when you're talking to somebody, like I'll be talking to my boyfriend or I'll be talking to somebody, and all of a sudden you open up Facebook. And the very thing that you're talking about is right there and your ad, and you're just like, this is so creepy.

BJ: 23:42

A whole nother aspect to that is there's the old quote that says, the pen is mightier than the sword and the danger in this, in the owning of data, is that if people are having a Piffen is out there in the wild and they're posting these on their social media, this literally gives the people that air quotes own the data the ability to steal those ideas.

Dwight: 24:03

I had a company that was doing a contract for a company and they got hit with a phishing attempt and the way they had their office, 365 environment in their accounting and their bank all set up is there was no call from any kind of a officer from the company. So if someone had the proper permissions internally on all their software and your accounting and their bank and what number bank accounts? Unless there was a stop that said, no, somebody has to verify transactions from the branch. I guess they were trying to streamline things, make things mostly as automated as possible. They lost a billion dollars. Somebody took a million dollars out of their bank account and transferred to a Chinese no-name company and all in the matter of a couple hours after a phishing attempt, someone got permissions or gotten a global administrator accountant or office 365 on into all their other stuff changed off passwords and whatnot. The banking information got legitimate information to answer to security questions, boom, million dollars gone.

Erin: 24:55

How did they answer the security questions?

Dwight: 24:57

They got into the banking system, their online banking system that the business was using. I don't understand why they didn't have some kind of a phone call or. They'd even changed the two FFA. So Dan to have a, but the God didn't change all that stuff. Well, the note and to have a on for, they didn't have a nonprofits, 365, they added on for the banking information or something. Anyway, I can't remember all the particular details, but this guy or this person was able to circumvent all this stuff anyway, and it did lose a million dollars. It was set up in properly internally, but there all the different integrations that they had and so the bank even said after, I think that if you had to have a verification process was involved a call back to the business to speak to a specific person than this never would have happened.

Erin: 25:37

Coinbase has been having a lot of things like that happen where there's people that have lost over a million dollars. I think somebody even lost$13 million once. And it was the same thing. To me, that sounds like an inside job. that's just where my mind goes, but maybe it's not. I guess there's security could just be that lacking.

Dwight: 25:54

Well, there Steve's everywhere. There's lots of stories of inside jobs. And so that's not saying it didn't happen. Did it? Maybe. Who knows? I don't know to this day that other events, if that one where he lost a million dollars. I never followed through with the investigation, but I just dealt with it purely because I got called into it. So I don't even know if it was in the news. But usually on the stuff, they'll pick and choose what they put. Guess it depends. Most of the stuff will show up in the local ENS. It was only for a smaller, it was a really big city, but I was actually calling on the track, new call into the job to track down and get so much information on the details as possible. And this wasn't even super complicated having an officer from the bank call verify a transaction over a specified amount of money, or if something looks suspicious the bank didn't see anything suspicious. Sometimes the banks, if you withdraw or you send money, that's over in the mail, it based upon your history, your bank will stop and say they'll put a hold on it and then you have to call in and verify. And also none of these processes were in place. So, for whatever reason, but it was an expensive learning lesson.

Erin: 26:53

Yeah, that's a good point. I have one question for you I'd like to ask. You worked a lots of people, and if you could tell everyone out there just one thing that they could do, what you think the most important thing they could do to keep themselves secure. What do you wish everybody would do?

Dwight: 27:09

keep self secure from as far as it related, do a little Google search and you can get lots of checklists that are very user-friendly very down to earth. Layman's terms. Very easy to understand. There's lots of information out there, like 14 steps, 10 steps, how to secure my home environment 10 steps to set up my home. 10 steps for best practices working from home. So you don't just talk to Google as you would talk to them on a person and Ask them a question and that's a great place to start. And that's what I was saying.

Erin: 27:34

Ask questions. Be curious, trust nothing. Trust nobody cause they definitely will take advantage Well, that sounds good. Blake BJ, do you guys have anything else? You want to add?

BJ: 27:44

No, this is a great stopping point because now Dwight's got the wheels in my head, turned in about this owning of data thing. And now my mind just went down a rabbit hole. So.

Erin: 27:51

yeah. I watched that documentary you're talking about Blake. It's on that's about Cambridge analytical.

Blake: 27:57

Yeah,

BJ: 27:58

Craig brought that to my attention and that startled me, but it didn't start on me to the depth of that I'm feeling startled right now. Cause I'm like, wait a minute. Your data really does define you as a person. And now they have the ability to use machine learning, to figure out at a very deep level what the data points mean. And then, people talking about metaverse. There's a lot of danger there. They can try to mimic someone's, whatever you wanna call it, personality, essence, whatever you want to call it because the data points that can be found through the application of deep machine learning algorithms, that's Ooh. And now we're getting into owning data could be a moral question.

Erin: 28:32

Oh, it is. I'd say it already is.

BJ: 28:34

I used to just think of it along the lines of privacy and I never really cared myself personally cause for me, privacy is not a big deal because just for me personally, but this is a whole nother can cause it's it goes beyond privacy because now it's like, what can they do with that data that they air quotes own? Cause it's a replica of me. That data is an output of me, of my essence.

Erin: 28:53

Yeah.

BJ: 28:55

That's scary to think about.

Erin: 28:56

It is scary. It freaks me out every time I think about it. I just need to get off social media, it just sucks because I've lived in so many places. I know so many people.

BJ: 29:05

Well, people should own their own data. That's the thing. No one should own your data because your data is a digital copy of you.

Blake: 29:11

You don't own it and you give it away.

BJ: 29:13

Yeah. So that literally, essentially it's almost like they've carbon copied everyone in a digital format, and then you don't own that copy of yourself now.

Erin: 29:21

No, and this is exactly what Edward Stone trying to warn us about back in the day. This is the exact same. you read his book yet, bJ? Is really good.

BJ: 29:30

I didn't. I remember watching a movie years ago and I thought it was wow. That's wow.

Erin: 29:35

The books even better, I would say.

BJ: 29:37

I'm sure. Yeah. The whole thing is very alarming when you trace it all the way from what we learned from Snowden and then you take it to present day. Facebook and having literally everyone's data to a degree that we probably can't fathom because Facebook announced a few months ago that they were going to have the world's largest, super computer here by this summer or something. And so the possibilities of what they could do with that data, and then reading articles about the borderline obsessiveness of this metaverse thing, it's just getting a little bit strange. The whole thing is getting a bit strange. I don't know if you guys saw it, but the employees of Facebook, they had a nickname for mark Zuckerberg and it was something about the eye of Soren or something. And what is all this what's really going on?

Dwight: 30:16

Some people when they get too rich, they get too much money. They live in a world that's totally out of this.

BJ: 30:21

Well power corrupts too. Just mathematically, if power corrupts, then the only solution is in being incorruptible. So if something's not incorruptible, you should expect a total corruption of it then. anyway, thanks, Dwight, for now giving me even more things to not sleep over at night,

Erin: 30:35

We have gone on for hours. It's hard to stop once we get started. But Yeah. there's a lot of things out there to think about.

BJ: 30:44

Yeah. Now it puts it in perspective for me. You guys know that I've been following that project on web three Skynet on the CYA blockchain and the guy who developed it, the lead developer, David Borek. I never understood. Cause he's always drilling all the time on this. You own your data users own their own data. They own their own data and I'm just like big deal. Who cares. But now I'm like, oh my God, the light bulb. I always thought, why is he making such a big point of that? I don't care about that. You know what I mean? I want other things about it. But now I'm like, oh wow. That is a big deal.

Erin: 31:14

Yeah, for sure.

BJ: 31:15

Well, great talk guys.

Erin: 31:17

Yeah. We could definitely talk about big data. But thank you. Do I really do hope that you're able to join us often.

Dwight: 31:24

I will make my best effort.

Erin: 31:25

That's great to have a different perspective on it too. It's nice to have a technical perspective.

BJ: 31:30

And that's exactly the gap that needs to be filled is the understanding between it and cyber. They're coming from two totally different angles, and as that gap is filled and people start to understand things more than we'll value, cyber security better. The more we understand it.

Dwight: 31:45

And I think, look as at different perspectives, right? Because we get an understanding each other and the way people look, everyone looks at the world differently. And then it's also educational for us because we don't become narrow minded and we become open-minded and we're willing to think and absorb other people's thoughts and ideas. At the end of the day, we make our own decisions, which what we're going to do. but at least we're educated. And if we're open, then we got all the information we need. And with that I'll have to leave.

Erin: 32:09

Beautiful note to leave it on. All right, again for joining and we'll talk tomorrow.

Dwight: 32:15

Okay.

Blake: 32:16

See you guys.