Why You Should Update Your Hardware and Software in the Coming Months

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0:48 To a scam. Let's talk about scams. It's the must-listen show for anyone who wants to protect themselves and their loved ones from scams. Every Tuesday at 8 a.m. Pacific Time on K4HD Radio, Joyce Petrowski, founder of Rose, and her guests will provide valuable insights and practical tips on how to recognize and protect yourself from scams. And now, here is your host, Joyce Petrowski. Hi, everyone. Glad to be back, and happy Cinco de Mayo. I trust Brian took good care of you guys over the last three weeks. You can find more information about Rose on our website at roseadvocacy.org. You'll find our social media links at the top. If you scroll down to the bottom, you can sign up for our newsletters. We have one that we send in the mail, and then we have another one we do via email. Great thing about the emailed one is you not only get the monthly email, emailed newsletter, but every Tuesday morning at 9.15 Arizona time, you're going to get a Tuesday tip. What that does is you might look at it and go, okay, I already know that one, but it's also reinforcing your healthy skepticism and your scam prevention habits. We're unfortunately at a time where we have to talk about scams in a positive way and in a nonjudgmental way, and we have

2:19 to talk about them because we need to build that healthy skepticism and that scam prevention habits. So the next time you're contacted, you're more apt to realize, hey, this is a scam. What do I need to do? So today we've got David Hawkins back to talk more artificial intelligence. Well, hello. Good to see you again. Good to see you too. So I did a little bit more digging this time and One of the things I wanted to talk about today was a little more about how you can use AI to protect yourself. Oh, okay.

3:00 You know, I think a lot of people are scared of AI. I think we talked about that before. And I have to admit, I use it a little bit, but I think there's a lot of people out there that rely on it and they just verbatim copy and paste and they can get into it. a lot of trouble that way, but I'm excited to hear, you know, how we can use it to protect ourselves. Yeah. And I think most of it, a lot of people have some kind of an AI tool. I mean, I'm sure you, what do you use as your own? I mean, I usually, if I'm struggling on writing something, you know, I'll, I'll just go into chat GPT and, and pull it up. But I know other people who, I've got some, um, friends that are experts in like ones in the co-pilot ones in, um.

3:53 Is it grok or something? And I just need to take the time to sit down with them to, um, get them to show me, you know, uh, cause they're. All the same. They're all the same and totally different. Uh, but they're, I'm going to show you a couple of things today that are really fun and we're going to cross most of those boundaries. Okay. Um, I don't actually use ChatGPT myself. I tried them last year. Okay. I don't really care one way or the other. I use a whole bunch of them. I do use Grok fairly heavily, primarily because that's great for really good news, up-to-date stuff because of its connection with Twitter X.

4:35 Oh, okay. On the other side, I use Gemini a lot, which is Google. Okay. Matter of fact, a lot of what I'm going to show you today is going to be in Gemini. And then I also use Claude because I like playing around with programming a little bit. And I'm not a programmer, so I need something that can program it. That's Claude. I saw one of our board members was showing us a few months ago some stuff that he quickly did with Claude. And it was phenomenal. Yeah, it's interesting. And let me share, this is my own personal opinion here. So but it has to do with all of these different tools.

5:17 Okay. When you use all of the free versions, you can ask like five or 10 questions and then it says, yep, you're done. Right. And is that for like a month? You only get like five or 10 questions in a day. Oh, a day. And I'll tell you when you think that's not much or a lot, I don't, depending on your perspective, once you start using an AI pretty heavily, you replace your search with, you know, instead of searching for things, you realize half the time when you go to search, you're not really searching for something. You're just trying to get an answer for something. True. You know, and that's like, you know, I can't tell you how many times it's like, how do you fix this thing in windows? So I'd go put it in a search and then I'd have to find like 20 different forums. And it's like, that's not what I wanted. I didn't want to find a place to get the answer. I just want the answer.

6:13 And that's what all these GPTs do for us. Okay. They just give you the answer right now. I mean, I'll do that a lot. If I'm working with the software, whether it's for the bookkeeping or it's for the newsletter, for something, if I don't know how to do it, my first thing is to go and do a Google search. How do you do this in mail or, uh, constant contact, you know, or how do you do this in, you know, whatever software. Right. Right. And, um, I just upped my volume a little bit. Let me know if that gets too much. So, um, so the things that we're going to talk about today, I got about 10, uh, areas that I did some research on where we could probably have a positive impact for people.

7:03 Okay. And some of these things are behaviors, little things that you can do that Once you understand how to do it, it's like, yeah, that makes sense. I could do that anytime. And then the others are maybe using a tool that you've never seen before. Okay. So first one, I'm going to use a couple slides that I prepared. So I'll share my screen real quick here. And what I'm going to do is that specific screen right there. There we go. I'm going to be hopping in and out of this because I'm going to do a real-time explanation demo along with the slide share. So this one here is the ones that probably the hardest one to defend against because it's an incoming phone call. And it's like, how do I help with that? How do I deal with that?

7:55 And how can I get any kind of AI help with that? So In that vein, one of the things that I've learned is how to use other tools. So this is Google Talk. Now, if you've never used it, if you go to Google, you can actually port a phone number or get a dummy phone number over here on Google Voice. And then you end up with this phone interface. Now, I'm just going to use this for convenience. Years ago, I got this phone number here. when I took this phone number and ported it over to my carrier and I didn't, this number was so bad. It's not bad, but it's not easy to memorize. When I saw this, I was like, I'm keeping this one. So I kept both, but I took the number that I was going to port into my new phone service and said, no, stick it over here on Google talk. So I have it there. And then I have my cell phone, which I'm going to call right now. And I'm going to mute this as soon as it comes up because I don't want it to. Let's see.

9:02 So your computer is calling your cell phone. Yeah. And I just called it, but you notice down here, I'm going to, uh, you notice down here in the bottom right corner, do you see that little record button? Yes. Well, that exists here too, on your phone. Right. So if you are on a call right now and I'm, uh, let's see, keep it on here. Um, There's a triple dot right next to the red button. When you hit that, it pops up a menu, and there's a record button right there. So you can record the call. Most people don't know it's there. Okay. So this is a big deal because, and I'm going to just end this call now. I just wanted to be able to bring it up so you could see it.

9:47 and know that it's on your phone. And I think it's on Google. This is an iPhone. So you could probably do the same thing. On an Android, I would imagine. On an Android. Just be aware of it, right? And like you said, when you first... brought that first. Slide up, it talks about the emails and the text messages. Yes. That you get. And you can screenshot those. You can copy and paste those. And you can put them in different things, right? To say, is this a scam or whatever? But the phone calls... So that's a great thing is to be able to click on that and record the call. That's exactly right. So if I had a text message on here that I wanted to analyze because I was unsure of it, I would open the text message. So I'm looking at the text. I'm not going to open anything inside of it. But I get the text message.

10:38 So now I'm going to see the message. And then you just put your finger on the message. hold it and you'll get a pop-up menu and you can copy it, copy it and go over to go over to any AI that you have on your phone and say, is this likely a scam? And paste it into there. Yeah. You can, you can do the same thing. If you had Google talk, you can do the same thing here. Um, so it's useful in that regard. It's very simple to do. Let me ask you this with this, this Google. And to be honest with you, I've never used any, this Google talk or any of the, um, I don't know if you'd call them internet phones or VOIP. So it's the same voiceover voiceover IP.

11:21 That's all. Okay. So I guess I have that on my phone. Cause for, for the company line, that's what it is. We don't actually have a landline. Yeah. And so, so the VoIP tools make all of this so much better, but the problem is most consumers don't have, you might, you might have a VoIP for years when I was living in California and, I had a garage door, well, not a garage door, but a gate opener that was, it would call me at my house if somebody came to deliver a pizza or something. Right. And I didn't have a landline, so I had to get a VoIP line. And that's actually kind of how I got into understanding these.

12:03 And I would imagine that scammers use like this Google Talk app. Yeah, they do. And as a matter of fact, the VoIP lines themselves, for the most part, are almost all what the scammers use. So if you can see what makes them so powerful in attacking you is that a VoIP tool can be used by an AI on a computer to auto-dial. Right. The scammer's not sitting there, you know, dialing all of these numbers. Not at all. As a matter of fact, what they mostly do, they actually have real cell phones that And they put a little tool on the cell phone like a prompt or like a script. And it auto dials at random. It goes through a list of whatever. And it just auto dials like crazy right from a mobile phone in some cases. Or it'll use a VoIP line like this and auto dial. And decades ago, when I first started in cybersecurity, I was in a sales role.

13:04 And they used to have this box you could buy called the demon dialer. And that's exactly what it did. You plugged it into a regular POTS telephone line and you set it up and the thing would just dial and dial and dial until it got somebody to pick up and then it would ring right through to your phone. Wow. Yeah, it was crazy. But so there's a lot of tools for the voice to get at you. And good tools for us to defend ourselves with. I will say I don't want to be an advertisement for Google Voice, but I want to point something out about Google Voice. you can tie your normal cell phone line to a Google voice account. And this thing can be used to filter your calls. Oh, that's another powerful tool.

13:47 It's going to filter it right on your phone. It can filter it before it even gets to your phone. Okay. So I know my, like my mother and my father, both, they get constant. I haven't done this for them. And now that I'm mentioning it, I'm probably going to do it for them later. But some of the tools that are going in place on Apple, for example, are really getting much better at filtering and getting rid of things like that. But you don't always have that luxury. So having a tool like this, where it'll give you the ability to send stuff directly to a voicemail, and you can open a web page and actually read the transcript of the message, If you're comfortable with a computer and you like it, this is one of the better ways to filter calls and deal with that. So that can really cut down how much comes, you know, those random phone calls that come to your phone.

14:44 Right. It's intercepting ahead of time. It saves you so much on answering these crazy calls. Nice. All right. So so I don't want to get stuck here because this is only the first one. I'm going to just pop the slides back over here just so we have kind of a step-by-step here. And get that back up. There it is. There. Everything in the background wants to show up now. Let's see here. There. And I'm going to put that slide deck back on present. Oh, yes. You know why it looks just like a screen? Because it's a screenshot. So I'm going to show you two tools here that are in real time instead of on here, but this sidebar is Claude. Okay. This one here, you can, you can actually use Gemini in line to copy and paste things into, and you can do even a copilot inside of your email. And I did this, these screenshots primarily because I didn't want to bring up my live email necessarily. Right. Right. But yeah, The the idea here is that when you have the sidebar turned on, it slides out and you can copy and paste things right into it. And rather than showing you the slide, let me just this I'd set this up here so I could show you in real time a little bit. So

16:18 let's go to an inbox. There we go. And I have your message to me earlier today. Just a quick, hey, we've got a meeting. But I want to show you how to get to these sidebars. And they're so brilliant if you can take advantage of them. So the first one here is Gemini. And I don't know. Can you tell me if you can see that? I mean, I can see it, but I can't read it. OK, let me just I'm going to jack this up really, really, really big here. Beyond, of course, none of the menus ever get magnified when you want them to. So I'm going to do, remember the screenshot trick? We're going to do the screenshot trick again. And here is the sidebar.

17:01 And I'm going to bring that up in, here we go. There. That better? Okay. Yeah. All right. All right. So here you can find in, on the, when you hit the triple dot in the top right of your browser, if you're using Chrome specifically, you get, uh, this open Gemini Chrome down here. So you can use that as a, uh, placeholder here. And I don't need the text. I just want to show you that. There you go. So that's, that's what we're, what we're going for is the open Gemini in Chrome. Okay. And when you get that, uh, what it gives you is a sidebar that now while you're, you're talking and, uh, let's see if I can, there we go. Move that over here. So, uh, If something came up in an email and I didn't want to open it, I could copy and paste a chunk of it and go over here to the side and say, does this sound like a scam?

17:58 And copy and put it in there. Okay. Hopefully it comes up and says no. Yeah, well, no, it should. It's just a simple email. Even if it doesn't, that's okay. At least you know you're seeing how it works. So this is digging in. And now one thing I will tell you, if people haven't already explained this, you should probably know. If you are using Google, Google Gmail, you have the option to opt in or opt out of whether or not Google can look at your emails. And that's important to know because maybe you don't want it to. Right. But on the other hand, if you say, you know, if you go into the trash and, you know, who knows what's going to be here. So I'm just going to, Leave that off to the side for a second. But let's say, are there any scam looking emails in my trash folder?

19:02 Oh, you could probably do that for any folder. Correct. I'm trying to stick to the trash just so it's so. And I'm thinking if there's going to be one, it's going to be there. Right. So it's saying, I'm looking through your trash. And this is the point. If you opt into allowing Google to help you manage your inbox, you have this at your disposal. If you opt out of that, you don't, right? So that's what you were saying, that you can go into your settings and you can opt in to have Google have access to your emails. And if you want to use the Gemini tool as.

19:43 far as like an email filtering, you're going to have to opt into that to say, yes, I allow Google to see my email. Yeah. And to be fair, I didn't think to prep on this point ahead of time. I think it's not in mail. It's actually in your account profile. Oh, okay. But here's the thing. How do I opt out of? Gemini scanning my email. So you can just ask the AI how to do it. And it'll tell you how you opt in and how you opt out.

20:23 So that's the easy button to figure out how to get these tools turned on or off. And then once you're using them, there are so many ways you can ask it to look at my emails. Are there any fraudulent looking emails? And I did a scan. Now you can do this two ways. So this one is Gemini. Now let's go to Claude. So if you happen to be a Claude user, you can actually use this as well. And it'll ask you upfront, do you want to, you know, use it for your inbox? And I chose to. And you notice here one of the very first actions. When you have Claude, Claude is probably the most sophisticated, generally speaking, the most sophisticated of all the AI tools that are out there right now, primarily because it's built for coders.

21:16 Okay. The key to this is that you're opting in, you're allowing it to scan your inbox. Now, I use this inbox specifically for nothing truly personal. I have a totally separate email for that. There's some personal stuff in here, but I never put bank account information in here. I keep it very clean. But do you see this first one? I don't know if you can read it. Unsubscribe from promotional emails. Exactly. So you know how many times you go through and you're like, I'm getting spammed with all of these emails? Absolutely, yes. That thing will take it out ahead of time. I'm surprised that it actually comes up and that's the first thing it asks you. Because normally that type of stuff is buried.

21:59 Yes, exactly. And that's the advantage of using a tool like this. You notice, I don't think Gemini offered us that right up front. So if I close Gemini for a minute, I don't know if it's just going to keep that same window. Yeah, it's going to start. I'm going to start fresh here with a new chat. And here we go. What can you do? Come up with new ideas. Help me plan my trip for this weekend. So it's doing more productivity things out of the box. The last security thing. Now, Claude knew I was very concerned. Last time I used it, I did a search on my inbox to say, show me the bad stuff.

22:39 Okay. So it already knew and it remembered that the last time I did this, I was doing something purely for security. So the very first thing it offered me was something security related. Okay. And in this case here, I could probably get this to do the same thing after a couple tries. The next time it came up, it might do the same thing. if it remembered the context of it. So I'm not too worried about that right now, but I just wanted you to know the difference between the two, they're very similar in terms of how they work and once they're connected, what they can do. But the one thing about Opus, in order for this to work, you need to install a plugin. So you actually have to go here to the little extensions and go down and manage extensions. And I'll do it just so we can see. If it's not already here, you're going to have to go to the Chrome Web Store and look up Claude. Yeah. Now, the other way you can do it is you could just ask Claude to do it. You can actually go to the Claude web page and say, install the extension, and it'll install it for you right from if you have Claude.

23:53 So, you know, this is another reason why. You want to have a trusted tech support person because your tech support person probably already knows how. To do this. And you could do a tutorial and you could do it without them physically being with you. You could do it online like we're doing it. Or they can come and you guys can sit down to, you know, together. But this is another reason is that they can, you know, help you do that. Yeah. And be able to help you use that. Gemini, Claude, ChatGBT, and different red flags to.

24:34 Look out for. Absolutely. So let me hop over to back to the deck because like I said, there's quite a few in here and I don't want to miss out on giving you some of these where it might help folks. So I think the Gemini, the The one thing I will point out, remember when I said at the beginning, I have a preference between all of the different AI tools. If you want good quality AI, you're going to have to pay for it. And most, almost all of them, it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 bucks a month. It's not that expensive. But generally that's, that's about the ballpark. The two that I don't like using much, ironically, is Claude and ChatGPT.

25:21 And the reason is they are now coming into what is called kind of a token. Everything you do is a token. And so every character that you type when you type instructions, it becomes what's called the context window. So the more characters, the more lines of whatever instructions you give it, the more complex the instruction, the more tokens it burns to go ask the question. And this morning I was using Claude to help me do something on a coding practice. I got about 15% of the way into it. And it went, you used up your, your subscribed amount. I have a $ 20 a month subscription on Claude and I burned through them in a 30 minute session.

26:08 Wow. Okay. Cause you only get so many tokens. Exactly. But if I use rock or Gemini, they don't do that. So that's something to be thinking about. Um, Now, I will say someday maybe Grok will catch up in all of its capabilities to the other platforms. And based on what I hear their roadmap is, they probably will. And they'll probably far exceed everybody else at some point because their data centers are going to be massive compared to everybody else. But Gemini is probably the biggest. Google is the biggest, most powerful, best deal for everything you could possibly do for an AI at the moment. And so, you know, you pay for Google one AI as a service.

26:54 It's in general somewhere around 20 bucks a month again. Okay. Once you have it, your access is not unlimited, but it's high. It's very high. I've almost never run out of queries with that. And, you know, I've done like nano banana making images and all kinds of different things and really, really use the heck out of it. And it just keeps on chugging. All right. But that said, getting back to what we talked about at the beginning, when I talked about recording, the voice, the video impersonation is going to be a little more difficult. But you have to ask yourself, are you answering just any random FaceTime call coming into your phone? Probably not. Right. If you don't see somebody's face that you know on the other side, you're probably going, eh. And if you do...

27:46 I mean, most of the time, let's face it, we plan these FaceTimes because you don't want to receive a FaceTime call while you're in the restroom. So what do you do? You say, hey, Junior, I'm going to call you at 5 o'clock. So you know when it's coming. You know that way you're in the right place. You've got maybe a little bit of lighting working for you. You're in the room you want to be in. So it's probably less likely that you're going to get a video call, but you will get the voice call. And that's why recording is so important. Absolutely. Those voice cloning calls come all the time. Yeah. And here's the thing. If the voice cloning calls come in, the minute you start recording, it's going to audibly tell the other end that you're recording, at which point it might have an auto exit and just say, see ya, and you get hung up on. If it's a legitimate call, a real legitimate call, and you say, I'm going to record this, and you hit record, The other party will go, okay, that's fair. It's business.

28:47 I get it. But if it's somebody trying to scam you, they're going to be like, oh, wait a minute. Nope, nope. So it's defense. That's really the whole point. Well, it's just like if you're on a Zoom or a Google Meet or Microsoft Teams, right? If somebody is going to record it, then it's going to pop up on your screen and you have to agree to it. Exactly. No. I will tell you, you can record almost anything without being detected. If you just happen to have something that you would record, like what we're doing right now, there's an offline version where you can record a show.

29:27 And if you have one installed on your computer, you can record anything. And so if you're just trying to protect yourself, it's good to have a recording cool tool that you can use. Um, you know, obviously be very, you have to be ethical in your actions, but absolutely. But if you think you're getting scammed, um, it's, you know, there's a, there's a line there where you can say, you know what, I'm going to just go along with this for a And I'm going to record it and I'm not going to tell them. And, you know, because you, you already suspect you have a scam going on here. Right. And you can tell them before the call ends, you know, I, by the way, I recorded this and if they freak out, boom, you know, you're, you know, you inform them as the law requires, even if you record it a little early, but at least you inform them, but you watch how quick they go. But if you captured some of the stuff, maybe you can actually, you know, protect yourself if you need recourse. Right. Right.

30:29 And if it was a scam and you're reporting it, you can, you know, give the recording to law enforcement. Exactly. And as long as you say it right before the end, look, I recorded this, you know, it's still to the letter of the law. It's not perfect because you really should tell them at the beginning. Right. But again, if you suspect you're being scammed, this is self-defense. Yeah. You know, so But I would always err on the side of ethical, logical, don't do it. Absolutely. You have to be ethical about it. Now, the AI chatbots that we talked about, same concept. Use those browser extensions for that. That's what the browser extension piece was all about, the sidebar. Use the sidebar anytime you're in a chat. And by the way, I don't know if you're a Windows user. There's a new Windows feature that you can connect your Android or your iPhone to your computer, and it'll pop up your text messages on your computer, just like an Apple would do. Okay.

31:33 It's a feature. I'm not going to go through it because the setup on it is painful. But if you can do it, and if you want to protect yourself, that's one of the best ways because you can just there on a screen, copy and paste in your AI and go, is this real? Yes, it's a lot easier. I think it's a lot more user-friendly to do it on a bigger screen. Yeah. Now, this slide here is kind of going to something we talked about on a previous one, which is when you're not sure of a URL, sometimes you open that. If you're on a web email client like Hotmail, Gmail, they pop up the message for you. They show you the link, but they don't activate it, so you're not compromised.

32:18 But you can right-click on that link and copy it and then go out to a tool like this. Yeah. And paste the URL in and say, is that safe? You know? Right. The way I pick on which one of these to use, whatever your antivirus is, for the most part, they probably have one. So there's Bitdefender. There's Malwarebytes. There's, if you've got McAfee. McAfee, right. All that stuff. Norton. There's a whole bunch of them out there. Yeah. Again, a good trusted tech support person can help you navigate this and show you how this works. How to get this installed. Exactly. And you should have it. I've got two of them installed on mine. First off, automatically, it's going to protect you to make sure you don't pop something up you shouldn't. It'll stop it in many cases.

33:11 So if you have the extension turned on, you're in a good place. So that's, that's an important one to not. Yeah. You know, speaking of the URLs, right. It can, I've seen it in a text before a screenshot of a text message where they have the link in there and it's spelled out and it starts with the H TTP S and then it should be a colon of And then two forward slashes. Right. But I've seen it where you. Just look at it and you're like, well, yeah, that, okay, it's got the S, it's a secure.

33:53 And you're like, okay. And then you go through and no, that looks right. But guess what? It was actually missing the colon. And, but again, you're already in your mind thinking HTTPS colon, you know, you're not saying it like that, but you're, you're looking for it. And it would be so easy to just miss that colon and, But if you put it into something like you just showed, it's going to pick up that that's not, that's not a, well. And, and just to be very candid on this, if somebody is really, really working to get you, I mean, not just some random drive by, but somebody is actively really trying to mess with you. They can stand up an HTTPS site and bring you back to it. And it'll fool your browser. You know, it, but that's where the URL checker will say, yeah, but it's not on the right server. It's not in the place I expect it to be. It's coming in from a different country.

34:51 So that's where the URL checkers in addition to the HTTPS, it's gold because it prevents you from getting into trouble. Well, right. It's going to give you all the information, right? And you could go, okay, well, wait a minute. Why is this originating from Africa? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that's, you know, really important. And always, if you, it's hard to remember to do these things. That's why it's so important to have the, uh, the plugins installed or the extensions installed, installed to your browser ahead of time, because it's, it really is a big thing. So let's go on a little bit or refund customer service impersonation scams. Those are huge.

35:32 These, yeah, these become, uh, these are the hardest ones because, uh, well, I will say this, Microsoft will never call you from their tech support department. No, it's hard to even find their tech support phone number to even try to contact them. They're not going to call you. One thing to think about, I want you to put this as a scam prevention in your brain right off the bat. Tech support is a cost center. It's an expense for every business that has to have one. And they pay people like me or people, you know, I used to do tech support early in my career. They pay people a fair amount of money to a lot of money to do tech support or they do contracts overseas where it might be cheaper, but they still have a big contract to do that.

36:22 Right. It's a cost center and there's no such thing as outbound customer tech support. There's outbound sales, but not tech support. So you should remember that anytime somebody says, yeah, we just detected blah, blah, blah. Nobody's going to call you ever to tell you that they thought you were scammed. The only thing that might pop up is if you have something like malware bites and it goes, Hey, by the way, I see that you've been hacked. You might want to take advantage of this, but you should be seeing that in the client application. And we're actually going to be, uh, my dad always picks the right time to call. Guess, guess why I'm texting. So there we go. Um, so, uh, In this instance, though, when tech support, and it's ironic because that's exactly why he's calling me, he needs help with something. But tech support, refund services, all of that stuff, it's going to be outside of the scope of what a business would do. A legitimate business would never do that.

37:29 So just bear that in mind. Unless you know that you bought into a service plan where somebody is going to call you and you paid for that, which is probably pretty expensive. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've, I've run into that before where I've been trying to, to get ahold of, you know, trying to find tech support and I can't get to them. And so then I just call the sales number cause I know somebody is going to pick up, but. I still can't get through. They're like, no, do you have a plan? And blah, blah, blah. Now this one here, um, uh, I'm bringing this one up. I, I, you know, it's, it's always uncomfortable talking about anything that's, you know. Sex, you know, but, but it happens all the time.

38:11 Yeah. You have to talk about it. So number one, if you get an email, I'm sure you've already mentioned this, but if anybody sends you an email and it goes into your junk mail and it says, Hey, we have dirty pictures of you. Don't ever click on period because they're, they're trying to scare you into clicking like, Oh my goodness. You know what happened? Um, And it's terrible because obviously it's already playing on somebody's guilt because those emails typically come in because somebody in your house went to a porn website. God forbid, but whatever, it does happen, right? Now that that has happened, every other person in the house is exposed. Every other person in the house now will probably get in their junk mail. We have compromising pictures of you, which they don't. It's just that That is the play. But this one is a little different. Nowadays, especially on Facebook or whatever, there are people doing things where they take a perfectly fully clothed picture of you and then transform it into a nude using AI. And that's just about as bad. It's not as bad because technically, yes, they could publish that, but you can say, look, it's AI.

39:30 Look at how great it made me look, you know? But you have to realize that you want to never react when something like that comes across your bow. The first thing you want to do is capture the image and use those sidebar AIs to to say, is this real? Where did they get this? How did they get this? Right. Yeah. It'll do a reverse image search type thing for you and tell you where it originated from and what the original picture looked like. I mean, I've gotten those emails, you know, before and, you know, actually I've, I've gotten voicemails before. It's been a long time. It's been a few years, you know, saying we've got compromising information or pictures or whatever and, or we know what you've been doing and we're going to leak it out to whatever.

40:23 And I'm just like, okay, fine, go ahead. And just as a simple thing I want to mention, we're talking in the previous one here. Well, no, this one. I mentioned going to a porn website, right? Now I want to just talk about what a porn, what the thing is with porn websites right off the bat. Now it's not so much that nobody wants to think, Oh, am I, am I going to go to, but, but somebody in your family might, but here's the thing. You should bring this message to the people, you know, and that is, um, they've already proven that, um, porn hub as an example actually is a, um, uh, child. What is that?

41:04 Um, yeah. Exploitation. Yeah. Yeah. They're doing child trafficking. Yeah. So, um, You don't want to be letting anybody you know get involved in any of that. Yeah. So bring that message to anybody you know. Yeah. And everybody in your household, look, I expect you not to go to these sites because. Right. That is a slippery slope really quickly. Yeah. Absolutely. I don't think there's been a case of any person who goes to one of those sites getting prosecuted. No, but definitely going to get investigated. Yeah. Yeah. And I will tell you, too, if you don't like the idea of causing PTSD in other people.

41:46 Yeah. Here's the thing to think about. The people that are trying to make sure that those sites don't have child porn are actually kind of like tech support people. And they have to go look at all those. Yeah, that's. And it's horrible to think that you're getting into that and causing. These people are actually getting serious mental issues. Yeah. No, it's just like. If you can convince everybody you know, the last thing you want to do is do this. Is go on one of those sites. All right. Let's go to number seven. On to the next. I don't like that subject. I know. I hate it, too. But, you know, if you don't ever talk about it. Then nobody knows. And nobody knows. And it's better we just mention it. Yes.

42:27 All right. Account takeovers. Account takeovers and anomalous activity. You know you can use two-factor authentication and password manager tools for this. And I'm going to show you something in a minute here on the password managers that I'm going to come back to it after this. I'm going to just, I think I have, no, I'm going to do it right now. Here we go. Okay. So here's the, the concept is, you know, have you been compromised? Right. Right. And most of your tools like Roboform actually have tools built into it. And I pick on Roboform because I've been using them for about 20 years. And if they weren't constantly improving their product, I might've changed to other products. Okay.

43:07 but they're so good after all of these years, they're not perfect. None of them are, but it's way better than nothing. So inside though, when you open the tool, they have this little shield icon and I'm going to, let me see if I can bring it up on a real webpage for a second. Let's go to this one here. So And I'm going to put it on the other screen for just a moment. Okay. Share everything in the world. But what I want to show you is the security center. And this I don't mind bringing over so much. You know, it's just an email.

43:52 This is kind of a junky email that I use. But if your emails have ever been breached or compromised, a lot of these password managers have tools to help you find that. And you can go in and just delete all of the access to them or make sure you do an update to your password. Okay. And then use the security overview. This is AI going through and saying, hey, here's your weak passwords. Here's your reused password. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So really useful. If you don't know how to do it, this is another one you can do. There's videos all over the place. Yeah, I've seen that with my password manager. Yeah. So it's a good, a very good one to use. know about and to take advantage of. And it's where AI is actually helping you because all of that's AI.

44:37 Yeah. All right. So we've got like three minutes. Yep. Well, this is it. And I want to get to the why we should update our hardware and software in the coming months. You got it. So this is super, super straightforward. Password manager, we just talked about it. Do your security review periodically. Trend awareness. And you notice I've got a couple sites up here. gaza.org fraud.org and aarp.org all have great trend scam trend awareness and of course your show. Absolutely and our our social media yep absolutely yeah. And then there is uh there are tools that you can actually find that do red flag training which is teaching you how to spot this stuff i'm sure you talk about this so i'm not going to go into that any further But there is one last thing, and this is for the AI aficionados. At some point in the future, you probably want to get involved with an AI agent or something like that. The way AI agents are working, you probably bring it all offline if you have a nice, powerful computer at home, and you can run your AI locally and not use the cloud service, not burn tokens. It might be a little slower, but it works. You can create a dashboard on your own computer that actually has all of your security tools and aggregate all of the information on your own little dashboard, including a bunch of tools to protect you for your security.

46:06 So that's a whole other topic. I won't go any further with that, but I just thought that would be worth mentioning at the very end here. Yeah, so in the last minute or two here, Somebody that wants to use these AI tools to check whether an email, a text, a voice recording, a picture, any of that stuff is safe or is it AI-generated, is it a scam likely, all of that stuff. There's got to be, just like any software, there's got to be security. patches and stuff like any software, you know, or updating your phone. So how, how secure are these and are they constantly coming out with updates?

46:55 They are, you know, so depending on how you choose to use the different tools in some cases, you download a client like for chat GPT, you can actually have a product on your computer. If it doesn't automatically update or ask you to update it, you can actually ask it directly check for updates and type it right in and it'll go check. As a matter of fact, one of the things that I like to do a lot with all of my AIs is to, especially if I've got one like the client side, Claude is I can ask it to check things running on my computer. Like, do I have the latest Java? Do I have the latest Python? These are different things that you would use.

47:40 Okay. You don't have to know all of the different technologies. You can say, what security items should I look at on my computer that are not covered by Windows security, for example? And the AI will go, oh, well, you could do all of these things. And it'll walk you through step-by-step exactly what to do. On how to do it, yeah. Yeah. And I know when we first talked yesterday, I'll just put it on the screen for a second here, or not yesterday, but last week, I mentioned that The Glasswing and the Merlin. Yes. I think it was Merlin. I'm not sure if it's Merlin. Anyways, there's a new model that Anthropic put out. Anthropic is Claude, same product. That's this Claude Opus 4.7 on the side. Okay.

48:33 So Anthropic is the company. Claude is the tool. Okay. And Opus is the model. Okay. So there's going to be a new model called, I think it's called Merlin, like I said. Anyways, it starts with an M. But it's going to be even more powerful than Opus. And what they did is they realized it was so powerful that it's actually able to look at source code on existing applications and find bugs that none of the existing application security is doing. And that's what Project Glasswing is all about. Is there actually using these tools to go look at all the legacy products that are out there, your salesforce.com? google hotmail all of these tools finding everything that's wrong with them and then pre-releasing anything that the ai is finding because the ai is finding way more than your typical um bug search tools have been finding up to this point.

49:37 So which is going to When you get notifications that you have updates, whether it's for a device, whether it's for software, an app, whatever it is, you got to make sure you do it because as this project gets out there and gets used more, it's going to find these security flaws. And then these companies are going to be fixing them. And the only way to get yours is. To update it. Right. And remember, it's almost always on you to protect your computer. You know, if you have an IT person because you work at a company, it's on them. That's great. Right. Because it's a company owns the computer. Whoever owns that computer, it's on that person to, or that company to keep it updated.

50:22 Absolutely. But if you're a home user, none of us have tech support, you know? So, yeah. So the project Glasswing is just one of many, all of the different companies, Google's doing one. They're all, Trying to do the same thing, which is make sure that they help you find the problems before the problems get exploited. Right. And then they exploit you. Yes. That's good. I'm glad they're putting security at the forefront. Yeah. And I will say there's so there's two two thoughts as to why they held back on this new model. The first one, of course, is because it's so powerful.

51:04 It's finding all these flaws. The other one, remember I told you Anthropic is kind of a token generator? Yes, yeah. It's expensive. I created an agent on my own PC at home to run locally, an OpenClaw agent. I burned through $ 50 in tokens in about two hours. Yeah, so it gets expensive. It was super expensive. I'd shut it off. I wanted to go local. But the thing is, Anthropic doesn't own massive data centers like Gemini or like Google and technically Grok. They own their data centers.

51:45 Yeah. So they have kind of semi unlimited compute and they can throw you access almost for free in some respects compared to Anthropic and open AI, because both of them, they're sitting on top of somebody else's data center. They're getting charged. That's why, um, OpenAI just killed the, I think it's called Sonnet, their video production thing. Because every time it was running, it was making all these great videos. It was costing them an arm and a leg. Yeah. And could have put them into bankruptcy potentially. Yeah. All right. We are actually over. Okay, sorry. No, you're fine.

52:25 I'm just going to get a message from Juan pretty soon saying. You got to cut. so so yeah the whole thing is just recognize there are people trying to protect us to a degree. You still have to do a lot of that yourself right you have to do your. Updates to help you protect yourself. Absolutely yep thank you david i really appreciate it you got um all right guys really quickly we're going to wrap it up here um don't forget to get on the website the home page has our social media links you can scroll to the bottom sign up for our newsletters um especially the emailed ones, the tip Tuesdays. And we look happy Cinco de Mayo and be safe out there today if you're going out. And we will see you back next Tuesday.

53:09 Well, that's all the knowledge for this episode. Tune in every Tuesday at 8 a.m. Pacific time on K4HD radio at K4HD. com as Joyce explores a variety of knowledge so you have the power to make scam protection your healthy habit. And until then, feel free to reach out to Joyce and let's talk about scams.