 ThinkTekAway, civil engagement lives here. Aloha, my name is Matt Darnell with Compto.Cloud, as always joined by Greg Jackson. Today we're going to have our format of first 15 minutes. We're talking about current events and some general tech trends that we see. And our last 15 minutes we'll be going over email inbox management. We all get thousands of emails per week. How do you manage it? How do you take control of it? And that's something that we will be discussing. But first, let's get going with something that is near and dear to Mr. Jackson's heart here. Location sharing in the wild. Tell us, what do you mean by that, Jackson? Oh, hold on. I'm checking my email. Okay. You've lost control. Obviously. Yeah, so recently in the news. Oh, that was a joke. Actually, I got two out while you were doing that. Yeah, right? That's good. Location sharing in the wild. Yeah, so recently in the news what I found interesting and this is, and I've got a couple of things I want to talk about. This one leads right into it, which is a lot of people are using applications that they want to share their location with somebody else. So maybe it's for work and I want to let you know my ETA. Maybe I want to let you know where I am in town. So recently there was a study done by a German company. And what they found was that a lot of these location-based sharing applications, you might see them in... So there's specific applications and I won't go into the names of the applications just for the sake of leaving the names out. But they actually discovered that all that data was being stored in clear text. So what you basically could find out is if you're familiar with the way websites work, you can get in post on your URL. So if you get information, if you push the get command, you can actually pull locations from previous people. You just go to the website, you use the get command. If you know what you're looking for, you can get information based on... So there was a leak of passwords, a leak of pictures, because people are leaving, you know, hey, this is the picture of this location. And this was on one particular... I want to say it was like over 10, like 13 or 18. So very interesting. Nothing's changed in terms of, hey, there's this really cool app. Let's just sign up for it and use it. And then next thing you know, you're basically oozing and dripping out all your personal data thinking, hey, it's a reputable app. It's on Android and it works just fine. But they're not locking it down. Very interesting to me. And it goes beyond that. I mean, I'm sure you probably read a story that if you're in the military, you can't use a Fitbit anymore. Because what, based on heat maps of how many people have Fitbits, they could tell where all the covert military base was because the military didn't know so much exercising. They knew, hey, there's a lot of activity going around these three city blocks in Afghanistan or some other war zone. Chances are there's a military outpost somewhere near there. So they literally can't, and that's just public. I mean, everybody knows it's public. But just using that data in different ways to find out. So they said, hey, you got a base here and you got one here and you got one here and they had to close them all down. And you can't use them anymore. So that location data is tough. And it's one of those things where you think, well, if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to worry about. And the danger with that is like saying, you know what, freedom of speech, if you've got nothing to say, you don't need freedom of speech. So it shouldn't go away just because you don't have anything to say. And I've got nothing to hide, but does that mean my data should be in the wild that I shouldn't worry about it? I mean, you could know where I live. You could know where my kids go to. I mean, where I go at 7.30 every morning is probably has something to do with where my kids go to school, the route that I take every morning. You're on vacation. Your house is empty. Absolutely. So it is a huge thing. And I used to, you know, a tinfoil hat, always keep my GPS off on my phone. But whenever I wanted to use the map, I'd manually have to turn it on. And it just got to be, you know, it's one of those things, ease of use and security. You know, if you want a lot of security, ease of use goes out the window. If you want a lot of ease of use, security goes out the window. You got to really pick where in the middle you want to be. Or if you want to be on one extreme side or the other. I know people that still use a football because they don't want to be traced. But as long as you're on the cellular network, they can triangulate and figure out where you are within about 10 feet. And so it is a dangerous thing. So let me add, do you keep your GPS constantly on your phone? Yeah, I'm connected. So in addition to every other app that's using it while the app is open, Google is storing that. Where are you going? I don't know if they're flushing it. I mean, that's one of the things that we don't... Nobody knows. Somebody knows. But maybe 15 people at Google know the actual data retentive policy there. I almost guaranteed Google's not flushing. I mean, that's part of analytics, right? Well, why would they flush? Right. Because they're going to do no evil. Right. Okay. Okay. So now here, I want to talk about this thing I came across. It's called PeerTube. And I don't know if you remember. There used to be a program called Kazaa. Uh-huh. And that was my first peer-to-peer file sharing. You know, big time music. I read about it. Is it before or after line wire? I'm not sure, but it was practically before electricity. I had to ride a bicycle to power my computer. And it was decentralized. I mean, there were these super nodes. Even, you know, it took a... People had to stop using the program for it to work. You know, there was this central thing that kind of got things going. But then once you started trading files, you know, it was decentralized. And PeerTube is once to be a YouTube that's decentralized. Meaning that when I upload a video, instead of going to one central server where it can be taken down, part of it's everybody that has this app running, you, by running this, I'm going to put some of it on your... You know, and some is going to go on their computer. Some is going to hear a computer. And then when someone wants to view it, we all stream our separate parts of that video. So it's really peer-to-peer. It's distributed. And for redundancy, maybe my video is in three different... Now, each portion is in three different places. Right. So if your computer crashes, I don't lose my video. But then it's kind of keeping track of those pointers. Say, okay, now you want to go here. Now you want to go here. So your part of the video knows where the next parts are. And there's no central authority. You can't take it down. As long as enough people get going with it, there's nothing that they self-discover. And there are trackers that you can go and look at that. So it's really... Well, so you can track torrents. I mean, what you're describing is a little bit like, you know, raid and torrent and video streaming all kind of mixed into one. And they can trace the torrents down. That's why ISPs can send out their legal notices to people that are downloading stuff or dishing out stuff that they should be doing. So they can find it. It just takes time. But as opposed to have one central authority, when they do a DMCA takedown request to YouTube, there's just one button and the video's gone. Now, I mean, you're going to go to... If it's stored on 3,000 disparate computers, how do you... Okay, that one video has got something wrong with it. So you're going to write a letter to all 3,000 of those people and take it down. So it's just an entirely different way of doing that. And you can create these networks where I want to create a separate distribution channel with the five of us. Is this for copyrighted video or is this for personal video? The peer tube thing. Oh, it's just for video. I mean, you upload it much. So if you're able to upload it, you can do that. I'm sure that they want bit torrents only for ISOs and disk images type of thing. But yeah, and that's the future. That was what Skype did so well. Instead of all the audio going back to a central server, it's once you made the connection, it was peer to peer. And then if you had a good connection, Skype would realize that and you kind of became a node and you were directing calls for them. So it's really, you'll have these nodes all around and directing traffic and it's just working throughout there. So I think peer tube or something similar like that than that is the wave of the future. I mean, the central monolith type of technology, like a YouTube, like a Facebook, those things, they can't be long for the world because of the kind of control and privacy concerns. I mean, the amount of data Facebook has on you and I was pretty surprised that when you go to Facebook, you can look and they'll tell you where they think you are. Are you liberal? Are you conservative? Have you ever seen that? No. They know. They're looking at your posts who you like and they'll say where on the spot. Are you far left? Are you far right? Are you moderate? And that's just what you can see. For a single guy or single gal, what kind of pictures do you look at? What picture do you stay on the longest? Oh, do you like sunrises or do you like moonshots? Some apps even record where the mouse hovers for how long. It's really interesting. Yeah, so that kind of thing is definitely going to be happening here. Okay. Now, let's talk about mobile VPN. This is similar to what you're talking about. We're talking about the ability to encrypt data. You and I have talked about this with customers where you got data at rest and you have data in transit. And what we are using our mobile devices for, we're just using it for more and more things. And what we're seeing is that if you're in a location, say I'm in the studio and I'm trying to look stuff up, any decent firewall can take logs and record where you're going for how long. In some cases, it can even track some of the packet information. And so the way, and you might have heard people in the news where if you're in a foreign country, you can't go to certain websites in other countries. So what, you know, being able to use a VPN, I kind of like the idea. You know, so Greg, this sounds like you're trying to do something shady or something like that, but as simple as going to start, you know how that coffee, right? Yeah. I've heard that rumor. Yeah. So I go into Starbucks and your data, unless you know that they're isolating your traffic to the web, anybody in there can be sniffing your packets. So why not just put VPN on? And VPN allows you to encapsulate that data so that if somebody looks at it, it's just scrambled. You don't really see anything. And I think, you know, some mobile devices, we've got WhatsApp, you've got even messaging stuff that if it's not encrypted, WhatsApp's a little bit probably one of the safer ones because they encrypt their data, but not everything that you do is encrypted. So, you know, whether you're out of country trying to get to a website, whether you're in a public domain, you're in a guest network, so to speak, but isolation is not turned on. And then, of course, the last one is something that you were talking about, torrents. I mean, not everybody allows torrents because a lot of people think you're doing, you know, bad things, but on my laptop, all I download on torrents is like ISOs. A lot of it's speed testing, stuff like that, but it's interesting. And, you know, with, because if you have an app, you don't know how much what's encrypted, what's non-encrypted, you know, your password. It could be sent in clear text, you know, over the web. And the theory on that is kind of like when you're sailing across the ocean, there's two theories. If you're alone on a boat is one, it takes me 20 minutes to get to the horizon. I need to wake up every 20 minutes and look at the horizon and see if any boats are coming at me. The other theory is, you know what, I'm a little teeny-ween little boat in a really big ocean. Chances are I'm not going to hit anything before I hit a Y. So it's almost like that with your app. I mean, chances are, if it's unencrypted, no one's going to, nothing will happen. But you are really opening yourself up to risk because most people have one general password. And there may be little deviations off that, but then someone finds your password for, you know, Facebook or something because you're using an app, a plug-in for Facebook, you know, one that puts cherries in your eyes or something, you know, and all of a sudden now your password has gone over there. The next thing, you know, they're still in your identity. And it's heartbreaking, you know. And the likelihood of you reusing that password or a derivation of it is high. Extremely high. Extremely high, you know. And so that's, it's very unlikely it's going to happen. But when it does happen, it's horrible. I mean, it takes people years to unravel the mess that these people make. Credit cards, loans, I mean, second mortgages on your house and cost them thousands of dollars. So yeah, so while the chances aren't high, you know, that VPN is very, very important. And, but on the other hand, when you're VPNing, you're VPNing to somewhere. And then at some point, it's got to get out on the web. So it's going to be secure from, you know, you're on the VPN provider, you VPN to me and I've got a connection to the internet. So then it just goes out over the internet. And so am I keeping track? Am I sniffing your traffic, you know, as far as what are you sending unencrypted going on over the web? So it's, there's a lot of trust involved with that. A lot of the apps that they have now bundled with like Antivirus software, you're seeing it bundled, you know, I'm on Sprint, Sprint's advertising VPN. You can find some free VPNs, but what you touched on a second ago is very important. You've got to trust who your VPN provider is because they're aggregating all your data. How can you? It takes one rogue employee, you know, and they're doing something. And, you know, the other thing that people do kind of similar is they'll use a proxy. And usually people you read about, they get around like, you can't watch this video from America, only from England. So you get a proxy or VPN that your traffic goes to Britain and then goes out on the internet. So it seems like you are actually in Britain to be able to do those. So it's a very complicated thing. So again, my name is Matt Darnell with Supporting Your Tech here with Greg Jackson. I'm going to check my email. We'll see you in a few minutes. Welcome back again, Matt Darnell with Supporting Your Tech here with Greg Jackson. We're going to be talking about email, your inbox. You probably, if you looked right now, have many thousands of emails in your inbox. I know I was just speaking with someone outside. They have over 100,000 items in their inbox. Two weeks ago I had 50,000 items in my inbox and I've kind of done some steps to try to get that under control. So I'm sure that's something that's affecting you. So let me just start with a very broad question here, Mr. Jackson. Managing your email box. How do you do it? Very carefully. I've got a lot of techniques. I'm interested to hear what you have to say because there's a lot of things that I've learned over the last 10 years with email and managing staff and working for people. Everyone's got a different philosophy. So if there's one takeaway, it just depends. It depends. And that is true. And what spurred me, I looked down at my count and it was 50,000 some... The real problem is the search is so horrible. The search is so horrible. I would say I'd go to my inbox and I would want contract for ABC Company. And the first thing it would show me was dated 2004. And five minutes later, it gets to 2018. And I've got a high-speed PC. I'm not starving for any resources. So then I thought, there's got to be a better way. And then I said, okay, I know what I'm going to do. I've heard people that do this, this zero inbox email. At the end of the day or the beginning of the morning, your inbox has got nothing in it. And so I read four or five things. I'm watching YouTube videos, how people do it. And so I said, okay, I'm going to do it. The first mistake I made is I deleted everything. I didn't delete my deleted items. So I still haven't... I haven't got a response to one of my... That's where it is. It's right in my... I said, I got to start fresh. So I went back the last month and anything that I wanted to keep, I just took care of. Right then, I don't need this email anymore. It's in my sent items. So I hit delete. I instantly regretted it. What I would have done was put them all in a folder off of my inbox called old or something. Because now whenever I search, I'm so frustrated because I can't come up with anything because it's in my deleted items. I've got to change where I want to search, not just this folder or something. So that was the first thing I did. I shouldn't have just deleted them. I was so excited to start fresh. And I got to be honest. When I walked to my computer the next morning, the normal kind of junk that I can delete really quick, it was very exhilarating. It's almost like a weight taken off of your chest. I don't have 50,000 emails, and of them, 45,000 are unread. And a lot of times they're unread because I'll see the little... Someone's just telling me something with the little toast pop up. I got the gist of it. I don't need to look at that email and that would always cause my old boss... You don't read my emails. I know exactly what you... I don't need to read your emails. So yeah, I went with that. And the next thing I did is... So whenever something came in, I really tried to discipline myself just to take care of it right then. See, before I would just open it and leave it open, that was my to-do list. Because in the past, I've tried to star them for follow-up that failed. I don't know anybody that can do that. So it would end up... Being like on a Friday, I'd have 15 emails open because some things I just want to get back to people on and Saturday, that was my normal Saturday routine. I would just answer all these emails and by that time, I'd had three emails on the same subject I would sometimes have. So I tried to get out of that habit. Right then, do it right then. Almost like when your phone rings. When your phone rings, I'm talking to somebody in person. I don't know why that is, answer the phone and you take care of it. So I tried to give email that priority. I wanted to give it a real time. Imagine someone is on the other end of the waiting for my response. Just like I don't answer the phone and just put it down and make them wait a week to say hello. So I tried to do it that. I've already fallen off the wagon twice. It just gets so... That gets very, very intimidating having to immediately reply to the email and then it got to... So then I get a couple hundred after a few days. I'm going to do it again. Start over, right? You fall off the wagon, you get right back on. So this time now I moved it to old. But the problem always comes and what if it is a chain? I want to keep this. So that's when I started making folders. I must have made a hundred folders in the past two weeks trying to categorize. Because you can't just have inbox and delete it. But you've got to have some kind of segregation so you can find things. Like somebody sends me... It's a price list. I want to have this for the next three years on how much this gadget costs. So now I have a pricing folder. In pricing I've got subfolders for that. And now it looks like a file system in my inbox. They're duplicated. So searching is faster. I can find pricing and I go there. But then I've got multiple price books. And so it's certainly much larger of a challenge. It's making me think, well maybe just having them all in one big folder and doing a search. Gizmo pricing. That thing. But I continually go back to the technology. Like right now my outlook is doing nothing. It should be looking at every one of my emails and trying to understand what is this email about. So I could type into my outlook search, show me the third email from Greg about the light switch. If you go to Google and I bet you typed Joe Montana's fourth touchdown pass it would be really close to finding what Joe Montana's fourth college pro high school. It would be able to find that. Google is able to do that. Why is it my outlook? Computers compute all day all night long. All it should be doing is trying to understand the intent. Trying to understand the content these years for the humans. We were supposed to be there by now with this artificial intelligence. It's 2018. It's like I'm on Eudora and just a basic search. Outlook is so tied into windows as the windows search. So I don't think a technology solution is coming soon. Maybe 10 years from now. They'll literally start to talk to me on the computer. Show me the latest contract proposal from the lighting company and it'll bring up the top five hits for what it thinks. Just like at Google, I can dig deeper if I need it. Did you mean college or do you mean pro? And do that. So that's not a given up on the technology helping me with that. It's a me problem. I've got to deal with. I've come across. You tell me now with your experience all that you've read. What would you recommend for me? How do I take control of my inbox? This is something I've learned over many, many years and working with many people. And the first thing is you've got to write this down. Write it down when you've found 10. I'm better than you because I have a fountain pen. FYI. First of all, nobody gets an award for processing email. We have to realize that. It's somehow loosely tied to work that needs to get done. Just remember that you don't get paid to process email. But I don't get paid to answer phone calls either. But my phone rings does not matter what I am doing. Unless I'm with a customer or really into something. 99% of the time when the phone rings, I'm going to answer it and I'm going to deal with it. Email is the exact opposite of this. Is that because we're so inborn that email... And is that what's a slack? I don't know if you ever use slack. That's the real time to communicate. If you want an answer right away, you text somebody. Next after that is slack. Then you can call them on the telephone. And then you send them at last. The further you get away from physical communication like what we're doing right now the less important it becomes. Emails and texts are on the bottom of the list in terms of priority. Really? I would say texts are on top. Because my son, if I call him and I don't text him first you know what he asks me? Why didn't you text me? Because it's the least intrusive. And I'm 50. And he's 15. That might be a huge thing. I hate texting. I text you all the time. I know. I'm not just calling me. But we're off of email. It's similar though. The thing is you've got to marry culture and work culture or personal culture. It's both. It's work culture because this is what your organization is going to support. I've had people where I said I'm going to take some advice from the four-hour work week from Tim Ferriss. And I talked to my VP. I said, hey look this is kind of what I want to do with me and my staff. I want to send out, I want to put an auto reply on my email. I'm going to say that I'm checking my email two, three times a day and it's going to take me a couple hours to respond. Response I got back was very animated. In a negative way. Great job, Jackson. Everybody should do that. And I'm not saying everything you read you should do, but we didn't even get a chance to try it. But what I would say is I kind of throttled back. But in reality that's the truth. What is? They should expect to wait a few hours for a response to an email. The customer? Your coworkers? Do you have those different buckets? Well, that's what I'm saying. You've got to be able to marry culture with what you are able to do. We all do things a little bit differently. How you file your stuff at home. How you process priorities. You and I have talked about that. Priorities. But if you can marry what is the culture willing to accept and what you're good at, that's the sweet spot. You can't control what other people expect. Because if you would have said Greg, how do you manage email? I would have said email is 24 hours or less. I'm sorry, 24 hours or less is a bonus. And nobody should expect a response within less than 24 hours. And if you do your expectations are a little too high. And you can't control expectations. But how do you shape up? Well, that's what sending out an email that says with an auto reply, your email is really important to me. I'll get back to you. I check my email two times a day. Kind of like your voicemail. Thanks for leaving a voicemail. I check it X number of days. Because the person in front of me is my priority. And this is where it's sometimes your customers, sometimes your co-workers are not going to support your kind of personal philosophy. That's why you've got to find something in the middle. But what you said is important. You've got to be able to set those expectations. Sometimes you have the beauty of setting the agreement with somebody. That is huge. So this is obviously a bigger topic that we're able to handle today. And so we're going to continue on with our email topics from spearfishing to fishing, clicking links. What do bad emails look like? So Aloha, again my name is Matt Darno with Grey Jackson. We're both with comptel.cloud. You can find us on the web, comptel by cloud like up in the sky. We're supporting your tech here on ThinkTech Hawaii. Aloha.