 Think Tech Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Welcome back to the Cyber Underground. I'm Dave, the Cyber Guy. Dave Stevens, I teach at Capulion and Community College for the University of Hawaii. And today one of my colleagues is here being our co-host, Tom Moore. Welcome, Tom. Hi, Dave. Hi, adjunct faculty, Capulion and Community College, University of Hawaii, just like me, teaching IT to all the young minds. Almost just like you. Barely. Welcome. Let's talk about some really strange stuff, but we want callers today, so let's announce the number. We're on live right now. We're at 808-374-2014. Please call in. We'd love to hear your comments. That's 808-374-2014. Call now. Robert is just standing by. Let's get into this. What's our main topic today? Well, you know, we don't just make this stuff up. There's a couple- What's our first article up? Yeah, well, the first article is about an alien cyber attack. As if we didn't have enough to worry about, I mean, you talk all the time about all the horrible things that happen with Equifax and Yahoo and whomever, and we kind of get fatigued about, you know, cyber attacks. And so- So let's add something to the soup. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I guess it happens with journalists, too. They have to just keep upping their game, and so this came out last month, and this is current events. So I do current events in class. You know, we do current events in class. Yeah, you have to. Try and keep the students engaged. Right. And two, not only was there that article, there's this other article. If we receive a message from aliens, should we delete it or should we delete it without reading it? You know, I saw these and thought, hey, this would be kind of fun to talk about. It's topical. And if we could get other people to come in and talk to us about it, that'd be even more fun. Messages from space have been something that we've been talking about over my entire lifetime. Probably yours, too. Right? Ever since science fiction has existed. Sure. We've been talking about aliens coming to Earth, and mostly people think of aliens as somebody from Star Trek. They're bipedal. They look human, but they have pointed ears, and they speak English, and they breathe air, and they have really good booze. Star Trek always had really good booze. Of course. So that would be wonderful. But is that reality? And if they sent us a message, one of the most important things is, how would we know? I'm not sure. We can't tell what the message we get apparently from grandma is from grandma. That's true. There's something called spoofing, which you could explain to us in excruciating detail. That would be really boring. We're not going to do that. But we can spoof and pretend you're somebody else and send a message. So the first thing we'd have to determine is, does this come from somebody that's not an alien? I think if an alien communicated with me via Facebook, I might be suspicious. Because they might not have an account. How would they log in? And they might not have an agenda. But they might have an agenda. And so the other first thing that we have to consider is whether they're good guys or whether they're bad guys. Are they black cats? How do you determine that? I don't know. You could read books, because in some of the books, the aliens are black hats. In some of the books, the aliens are white hats. There's type X, type Y. Lord knows. But that certainly would figure into the question whether or not we should respond. Because I don't know. Perhaps our callers will explain to us whether the aliens are good guys or whether they're bad guys. And perhaps our callers will even have varied opinions on this. Because I'm right this very second. I'm not completely sure. Yeah, right. So let's talk about their communication. If we actually got a communication, we'd have to identify it, first of all. And the only thing we really monitor for communications right now all the time is radio. Electromagnetic frequencies, microwave, radio communication, the whole spectrum. But as we know, there's a limitation to how fast that can travel anywhere in the universe. It's 186,000 miles per second. Speed of light. Exactly. Right? So if we did get a message, unless it's from one of the local planets, we're going to get something that's millions of years old, which might not be relevant considering in a million years we might have, you know, undone ourselves. What about another species? Might have undone themselves. So maybe we should be looking for something that could possibly travel faster than the speed of light. And the only thing that I could find out there, I've been following this since about 2012, the Fermilab that has a nice website. We could show you. Fermilab in Batvia, Illinois has a partnership with 89 other research universities. And they actually go out and they try to accelerate particles and capture them and see what they can do with exotic particles. And one of them is called the neutrino. And in a trino, they did an experiment in 2012 and were able to send neutrinos over a certain distance about a mile under the earth and receive a one percent loss rate, by the way, which is incredible. They were able to spell out the word neutrino. Now right now it's incredibly difficult for humans to send and receive neutrinos because they're an exotic particle. Hardly anything ever slows them down. They're barely affected by gravity. So they travel through anything. And we theoretically, we're saying we theorize that they could move faster than light. This could be interstellar communication capable for humans. So why not somebody else in the universe? But we're not listening. I was just reading that article in line at Long's from Star. And I think I actually heard them say that they received some of those messages before they were sent. That's fast. That is really fast. Which might mean that something's up with our linear version of time. If they're before they got sent, we might think, well, I haven't pressed send yet. How am I receiving these? And it's spelled neutrino. So maybe there is a time shift possible. And again, we're not listening. So let's talk about if they actually did communicate. They could be evil. They could be completely indifferent. And it could be just like a surveyor going out there looking for another piece of property. And they find this planet and they say, hey, look, water. This is kind of unusual. There's not a lot of water in the universe. So we could use this planet. Oh, there's these elements on their squirrels. And they build houses. And they have jobs and drive cars. Let's just pay you over that. We don't need to think about that. That could be a problem. That could be a problem, because we can't communicate with them. And we're boring. And there's so much more advance that they can slip through time. Let's just pretend. And they get here, and they're not really bad. They're just indifferent. They don't care. They're indifferent. What do we do about that? How do we signal, hey, hey, hey, we like our lives? I've been using this. But I'm not so confident that that would work under those circumstances. And if we try and reverse the situation, I don't know about you. I won't even admit it on TV. But I know people that kill ants, because they're in the way, or mosquitoes. They're annoying. And so if we were annoying, in answer to your question, what would I try to do? Not be annoying. Not be annoying, yeah. The problem is we don't even know exactly when they get here. Right? What would it look like? Yeah, what would they look like? What would that arrival look like? Like the bar in Star Trek? Maybe not. I would love it if that was the case. I mean, those are the best sci-fi movies, I think, when they arrive. They just have a third eye or a sixth finger. And everything else is fine. And somebody has sex, and they drink a lot. And then everybody's great. That would be the worst case scenario. The worst is HD Wells. Yeah, War of the Worlds. The War of the Worlds. Scared the crap out of absolutely everybody. Yeah, and no matter how many warnings you put in, this is a test. This is a test. This is a test. This is a drill. This is a drill. Still, people freaked out in War of the Worlds. It was quite a thing. You got to go back at that time, though. And the world, the worlds came on over the radio in the 30s, right? And if you missed, hey, this is a test. And I've heard the actual, I had a record. By the way, that was a vinyl. Made of vinyl? Record that kids don't know what those are today. Anyway, I had one of those and I listened to it twice and I missed that statement twice. And so people were committing suicide. This was like the Fox News of the 1930s. And people were committing suicide because they thought they were being attacked by aliens. Worst case scenario, what if that happens and we can't defend ourselves? Do we depend on germs? I don't know. I got plenty. Yeah, well, we have movies wherein we win, shocking. But it depends. The other problem is, if you're going to ascend the surveyors as you suggested, these are going to be warrior-type surveyors. Would you think so? Yeah, I would think that you would send the warriors first and the social workers after that. The sort of understanding types would go after the warriors. This sounds shockingly familiar. We did land on these shores about 400 years ago with the warrior surveyors. Who did the preemptive strikes on the native population and embarrassingly enough some of those were my family members. We've done it in the past, in recent decades, too, if you think about it, warriors, then social workers, and then go over. We're sorry, but we're still taking over. By the way, that's our flag. Yeah, yes. Well, you don't have a flag? No flag, no country. Those are the rules. According to Eddie Izzard, I love that. Well, let's talk about, let's talk about, if they did send a message, what if they sent a link or an attachment or some kind of information? We could be concerned about that, right? It could be just like any other cyber attack. It looks innocent enough. It's coming in, hey, we're out here. We want you to communicate with us. Click here. What if it did come through like that? Should we click on it? How do we examine something that we've never seen before? That could be a problem. Well, punt, we could always punt. We just forward it to someone smarter than us. We could send it to Dave. We could send it to NASA. We could send it to somewhere else. But interacting in any way whatsoever, as you well know, makes you somewhat more vulnerable to it than not interacting with it. It's an alien zero day. Yeah, there you go, there you go. I mean... This is far out. But nothing, in science, we know nothing's impossible. It could be computationally improbable, but there's always a smidgen of chance that it could actually occur and that's what we're talking about today. What if we got a message from space? Would it be from millions of years ago? Would it be from yesterday? Or before yesterday. Or before yesterday. Oh, that would freak me out, right? Before today. Before today. Yeah, okay. Well, I got one of those yesterday, a real-life honest-to-goddess, ordinary old-fashioned attack, and I just turned off my machine. And I thought some happy thoughts and I turned my machine back on and it wasn't there. And I did some scans and I didn't interact with it. And it's maybe not the best possible device, but there are a lot of worse things you could do with it. There are. We have to mention that we went over the ransomware attacks a little while ago and one of the first things that people were doing is switching off their machines and powering them down. Oh, yeah, and there's an exception to every rule. Yeah, yeah, that's true. That's not the good thing. The good thing is yank that network plug out or turn off your Wi-Fi, but leave the computer on because in active memory may be the encryption key that's encrypting your files. You can use that to decrypt your files. So leave the power on. There's tools you can run on your computer that can fish out that key and maybe decrypt your files. So there's exceptions to every rule. Yeah, I just don't want to power down if you're getting ransomware attacks. But what's the equivalent of an alien ransomware attack? We will obliterate your species. We have to be useful for something. Slaves, engine parts. Biological materials, food, I know. Soil and green. Soil and green, yeah, that's a possibility. I don't know, that's why it's interesting and that's what our callers will tell us. Do call in. 808-374-2014-808-374-2014. That number once again, 808-274. Oh, sorry, 374-2014. That explains it. Oh, they haven't been calling the right number. Did I read the right number? Probably, yeah. Is it 4102473, I don't know, just pick some numbers. You can probably, they're laughing outside. Look up thinktechquiet.com. That's true, yeah. Oh, there it is on the screen. There we go. Call us there. That's right, they put it on the screen before too. We're just going off the deep end. They had a fair chance. Yeah, fair warning, yeah, now you gotta listen to us. So let's talk more about what could come over on a communication and attachment. Of course, pop-up is one thing. The classic A, classic B is an attachment. An attachment to what, though? Everything is an attachment. An attachment, would they send us an email? If they wanted to, well, they could do it in social media, depending. But they would have to have some sort of contemporary understanding. So if I get an email from Zork, I should maybe suspect. Zork's a guy in Chicago. Yeah, that Zork doesn't necessarily mean that it's an alien. Isn't that Prince Zork? Yeah, it could be. Nambia? Yeah. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. That secret country right next to Wakanda. Yeah, yeah. What countries are in this square? Right, in the center of Africa that no one knows about. Yeah, there's a bunch of countries. We're Americans and we're so arrogant we don't learn about other things. That's right, and that's where the aliens are from. That's right. That's the portal. But would they send an email? I mean, they'd have to study our culture in no network protocols. No email client protocol, email protocols in general. They just need to know how we do things in order to send us a message. Or do they just send us, like we sent a satellite into orbit with a gold record with the Rolling Stones. Were you on that? That was you? Yeah. I thought that was Winston Churchill. No. You look younger back then. And like a stick. And you've lost weight, yeah. Okay, we're gonna take a little break, come right back, we're gonna pay some bills till then stay safe. Aloha kakau. I am Andrea, I am from Italy and I've been studying and working here in Hawaii for more than three years for my PhD. Hawaii is home to a truly fantastic community of middle and high school students. And did you know some of them are currently out there right now using their free time to invent new quantum computers? And did you know some of them are exploring cybersecurity and the new frontiers of robotics? I am just always amazed as I talk to them with science fears. Oh, but there's more. Did you know that these students are coming here on Fintech, Hawaii to share their story with us? Come and join the new young talents making way show and discover how these students are shaping our future. Starting on February the sixth, every Tuesday at 11 a.m. Only here at Fintech, Hawaii. Mahalo. Welcome back to our first show. We're asking for collars, cyber underground. I'm Dave Stevens. This is Tom Moore from the University of Hawaii and we're talking about what if aliens actually did communicate with us? And I think we're gonna approach what if they actually did understand email and we got an email message from, not Zork because he's the guy from Chicago, but the other guy. Let's first of all, let's talk about how they caught Jared Vogel. Now Jared Vogel is a spokesperson for Subway Sammiches and I had a file, unfortunately. So he was in a child pornography and they caught him with dogs. There's an article, it must be true. It must be true if it's on the internet. Yeah. The first person I showed this article about the cyber sniffing dogs, they said, well, how do they know it's child pornography? And he said, they don't. So dogs of course have an exceptional sense of smell. They didn't. Electronic components give off a certain smell. So you can't get away from the basics. You got silicon, there's wafers on top of silicon they're attached to the silicon by metal components and then secured through solder which is a little bit of flux and some tin. And that gives off a really potent smell which a dog could smell from miles away. And of course these cyber sniffing dogs went in and detected electronic things that a few people had hidden in places they didn't think anyone could find. So the dogs were actually able to sniff out electronics, not porn, it just happened to be child pornography on the electronic devices. But still, training a dog to go out and sniff electronic devices is a pretty cool trick. Yeah, and words to the wise, if you're going to hide your electronics, don't hide them in a place that would be suspicious if the dog started pointing at it like inside the couch. Right. I could even smell electronics that are inside the couch if it's fried as a result of a lightning strike or something like that. We have a name for it in the biz it's called smells expensive. Smell. Yeah, you don't have to be a dog to smell that kind of electronic smell. But clearly it's the same stuff. Dogs are better at finding the ordinary smells and if the electronics are in a funny place that's going to call suspicious. It's going to create suspicion. It's going to arouse suspicion and the cops are going to look there. And it's good to note that this technique has been used for hundreds of years. They used dogs to actually do this stuff. And back as far as World War II, we have documentation during World War II that the Nazis tried to find juice hiding out in places. And the Dutch and the Danish were the ones that put cocaine in little baggies in places for the dogs to sniff. The dogs would sniff the cocaine it would numb their senses and probably give them a hell of a good high. But it would numb their senses enough that they couldn't smell people. And so drug dealers will use coffee grounds. So really potent smell can mask other smells. But now dogs know, hey, if there's coffee in there, maybe we should check that out. If it's not labeled coffee, so if it's not labeled tech parts or computer parts and it smells like computer parts, maybe we ought to go check the pantry in the bucket of flour and see why there's a flash drive in there. And it's good work. I mean, this is smart police work. That they train these dogs to do this. This is our law enforcement thinking out of the box. And I like to know that they're doing that. I know many people are against law enforcement as a stupid law enforcement. They think everybody's a dirt bag and it's just us against them. But that's not true. We pay tax dollars for them to take all the risks and think about how to protect us. And this is one of the ways they get it. And good for you, law enforcement. Yay team. Yay team, yeah, I like that very well. Let's get back into what we're talking about. Aliens, of course, communicating with us and we can just pretend that they can send us an email message and we got it. Well, once again, we don't just make this stuff up. We get articles, we read the articles, we share them. And in addition to three, in addition to the articles we showed you before, there were a series of articles that came out last month sourced by or initiated by Michio Kaku, who has come out with a new book and it's the future of humanity and that produced a whole flood of articles, a whole series of articles because it links together with just the sort of random notion of, oh, there could be a cyber attack. Kaku is theorizing that now is when the aliens are going to start talking to us. In this century, he proposes, I'm not sure if there's any connection whatsoever to the sales of his book. But nonetheless. Side note, we work with those guys right there. We do? That's the rest of the IT department looking down on us. Oh, that's, that's, the Steve and Hal and Dale and Richard. Hi guys. Hi. Hi, how you doing? Yeah. Well, I'm glad you could join us on the show today. We all look like that at some point during the day. To our students, we all look like that all the time. Yes. So I like Michio Kaku because he sparks conversation. Absolutely. You know, not everyone's gonna agree with him, but damn, he really gets the metal moving. People like, everything breaks down, that metal melts and spreads out and now you gotta talk about it because it's going everywhere. And so good for him. I love his theory and the article that I was reading about squirrels. Yes. You know, I know you think mosquitoes, ants, I tend to go with the squirrel one because we're kind of industrious mammals. And so are squirrels. So if you're walking through the forest, yeah, you could talk to the squirrel, but as he was saying, you get bored. What are you gonna do with the squirrel? Hi, squirrel. And now I've gotta continue on with my day and build this road. By the way, would you move? Yeah. And then you lay down a road and it's beautiful and where's that squirrel? What's this bump in the road? Oops. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Oh, gosh. Why is there a bump under this carpet? Where's that hammer? Where's it? I'll get this one. Yeah. I, that is my theory really. If aliens are so advanced that they can visit this world, they're gonna see us as some kind of insignificant annoyance and they're gonna think, I need to build my house here because there's plenty of water and let's just get these ants out of the way. Let's move the squirrels or let's cage them and sell them at a pet store. Oh. Oh. That's a thought. That would be terrible. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's just look at mistakes. Mistakes happen. Maybe if we could make an accurate decision about whether the aliens were good guys or bad guys. How do we determine that? I don't know. What's the criteria? Let's stipulate that we could. Let's just assume for the sake of argument that we could somehow do that. And let's assume further that we could figure out how to tell when they're communicating with us. Okay. And then that brings us to what should we do and what could possibly go wrong? Because even when we have all of the facts, true facts or alternate facts, the facts of the day, even when we have all the facts, things don't necessarily go right. Things go wrong sometimes. I'm thinking of an episode of Twilight Zone. How to Serve Man. Yeah. Okay. Tell us more about that. Everybody out there, go to Google right now. Look up how to serve man, Twilight Zone. It is that scenario. Aliens come to Earth. It's a frightening thing. Everyone is scared to death. And they say, no, no, we're benevolent. We're gonna teach you how to shield your cities so you can't be attacked. So it ends war. We're gonna teach you how to add this little nitrate to the soil and make every place on Earth fertile and everybody's gonna be happy. And this alien is carrying around the book and he leaves it behind by mistake. So people try to decode this book and it takes them forever. And all they can decode is the title, this is How to Serve Man. And they're trying to decode the rest of the book while they're taking people to their home world to show them their beautiful place and everybody's signing up to go. And at the very end, you find out how to serve man. It's a cookbook. Oh, I didn't see that coming until just before we got there. It's probably the best episode I've ever seen of Twilight Zone. But it actually accentuates this point. Even if they look benevolent, even if they look nice, they could be the Trump administration. You never know who they are or what they can actually pull off. And you kids at home wondering what the Twilight Zone is, let me explain, it was in black and white. Black and white, but it had everybody. Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner, everybody, anybody who was a star all the way up through the 90s was on Twilight Zone, right? I can't remember who was in this episode though. Yeah, that's easy to explain. But the alien, I will tell you, is probably one of the tallest people that I've ever seen. I gotta look up that episode now. He was like seven feet tall. Well, really? Yeah. Or he was walking on top of another person, I don't know. So with regard to choices and with regard to decisions, one of the reasons our decisions aren't necessarily very good, they aren't like thought out, is because they aren't thought out at all. They're just a reflex. So what is the Trump administration? That's been a certain- Reflected thinking, responding, tweeting. Exactly. That's how we handle things. That's exactly how we do it. And a lot of times those aforementioned tweets, I'm sorry, those aforementioned links, those pop-ups, those attachments, we don't even think. Our bodies move faster than our minds. We simply click on it. We reach for the enticement. Exactly. As humans, that's what we do. Oh, more. Yep. New, shiny. Squirrel. Yeah. There's no consideration just a reflex. That's right. That gets us into any world of trouble. So we got two more minutes. You want to see someone with more of these articles? You want to show our audience? Yeah. A few more of these things. A few warnings from out there. Oh, threat from aliens. Please go read these articles. By the way, flying saucers, I wouldn't think they'd show up like that. I love when people say, oh, I saw a flying saucer with blinking lights. If I'm an alien flying around at night, I'm not going to have my lights on. Yeah, I would think cloak mode would be more appropriate. Yeah, right. That's why we have cloak mode. Science fiction, right? By the way, if you want to know what's going to happen in the future, ladies and gentlemen, read science fiction. Science fiction authors come up with these crazy ideas and kids like us read Jules Verne, Heinlein, Asimov, and all the greats. And that causes people to create the future. Case in point, Motorola, they invented the cell phone because the inventor of the cell phone watched Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek and thought, communicators, that's not a bad idea. I hate dragging my phone around with a cord on it. Perhaps we could make money. Perhaps. Oh, that's the sad thing, we have to make money with everything. Well, it would be, we would be better off in our decision making if we considered a slightly longer time horizon and certainly read- Whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down, man. You're in America. Thinking long-term. Come on, let's just out of bounds. I'm not saying anybody's going to do it because I mentioned it, but it- There are companies in other countries that plan like Japan. I believe it was Honda or Toyota, plan 200 years in the future. Now, how do you do that? That's got to be, because there's going to be some changes that you don't know about, but you're planning 200 years out. What do Americans plan? I plan for a day after tomorrow? Yeah. Yeah, I plan the show yesterday with you. At the weekend. Yeah, at the weekend. Wait, we plan the show at 11. Two hours ago. Yes, exactly. Well, another challenge to making good decisions is we don't tend to consider what could possibly go wrong. You know, what's the worst-case scenario? So sadly, sad-sad case, someone suggested to their teammate, their rugby-playing teammate, here, eat this slug. It'll be great fun. Oh, now he's paralyzed. Now he's a quadriplegic. Wow. Both of them are really sad, and neither of them are dead. That's not the worst thing. These people are now committed to a life of misery hell on earth for the rest of their existence, because they didn't consider the consequence. They didn't really consider. Sometimes the choices, the bad choices we make, have long-term consequences. It's a good point. So we should take two things away from the show as we wrap it up. Long-term consequences. So maybe we shouldn't communicate with aliens. Maybe. And, ladies and gentlemen, don't eat slugs. It's the most important thing, and we'll be back next week with a war-important and friendly show. And please start calling in until then. Stay safe. Save the species. Save the species.