 ThinkTek Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Aloha, my name is Matt Darnell. I'm here the host here of Hawaii Tech Today, here with co-hosts here, Greg Jack and Greg. Good to be here again with you. Yeah, so we're starting a new series here. It's going to be, you know, small and medium-sized business computer network types of technology they have going all the way from the internet down to the device, whether that be a tablet or a computer, and all the steps in between. It's something very confusing for, you know, small business owners, the kind of technology they need, where they should spend their money, where they may be overspending money, and also talk about some of the security ramifications of the decisions that they make. Before we get to that, we're going to start with our current events here. And one that I was reading was, you know, I think this affects everybody. Whenever you're in public, and have you ever shoulder-surfed? And what that means is, if I'm here on my mobile phone, I'm a tall guy. There's not many shoulders I can't look over. And all of a sudden, I'm looking at what someone else does. Do you expect privacy when you're, say, on the bus or you're sitting downtown? Yeah, so I have to reset my expectations, right? So when I'm in a public area, I mean, I tend to, I try to not to look at other people's devices. You try to not, but you want to. Well, something, you know, it's like a light or something. You glance over, oh, that guy needs some privacy, so you let it go. But when I'm in public places and I'm looking at my phone, you know, I kind of tuck it in a little bit, look at what I'm, you know, I need to look at. But it happens a lot more than I'd like. I mean, you know, my kids do it all the time. I'm texting a friend. Hey, you know, you're talking to Jason or, you know, whatever. So what I find interesting is that they're an IT. We learned a long time ago when people are putting codes into a door or they're putting a password into a keyboard. You tend to just kind of look away and then look back. So that's kind of like this unspoken protocol. But, you know, there's no real rulebook for people. And I think a key point is people should have no expectation of privacy. That's right. I was speaking with somebody earlier who's very knowledgeable on this subject. And I think that's the legal definition that you should have an expectation of privacy. But if you're in a public place and you're watching a movie or on an airplane, person next to you is watching a good movie. And, you know, I think you should expect that other people are watching what you're doing. And I just saw a story today, literally today, that, you know, someone had an Amazon Alexa. It's one of the smart speakers. And it recorded something and sent it to someone, a random person in their contact list. And it happened to be an employee of that one of the person that was being recorded. And they called them and said, hey, unplug your Alexa right now. And this is what you were talking about. You're talking about this, talking about that. And so, you know, I remember back in the 60s and 70s, you know, you'd always hear, you know, the people saying the government's trying to, you know, bug my home. They're bugging my car. And now we're buying these bugs. I mean, they're always listening, you know, and you think Alexa and, but even a cell phone, like my cell phone, I could say, okay, Google, or, you know, if you have an iPhone, say Siri, ask Siri, they're always listening. You just said it now, all the phones are gone. I apologize. I apologize. But yeah. So the point being that, you know, you really should have no expectation of privacy. Totally agree. And if you're looking at something on your phone, then expect that everyone else around you is looking at the same thing. Exactly. And I think privacy is a really good point, right? So one of the news articles I read was Google and their personal ledger. So there's this video that came out. I think it's like nine minutes long. And they talk about, the video talks about how the, the use of data and data analytics is going to help shape how we manage data. So at a macro level. So what that might look like is decisions that we make or preferences we have, the movements we make on the screen or geographical locations, all those things getting collected. Now have some meaning to it. And the trick is who's going to manage the meeting and how is it going to be presented to us? And then what are we going to do with that? Who owns that? Are we stewards of it? You know, Google's obviously in the forefront of data collection. So, you know, Mike, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I will tell you, it makes me a little nervous that there's that much data being collected about where I am, who I'm with. And I'm pretty sure companies are going to be judicious in scrubbing the data. And that's one of the other articles I'll tell you about that I thought was interesting. But I think that when we look at the data collection, if we behave in a way that we don't expect that privacy, as one government employee told me, Greg, if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to worry about. All right. And there's three challenges with that, right? First one being you've got to collect the data, right? So collecting that data, which means how do you do that? So, like, most people sell phones, they keep the GPS on all the time. And it phones home. It tells them where you are. So that's the first step they do. And second step beyond that is you've got to correlate the data. Like, for instance, if your phone and my phone are in the same place, that's not worth a lot. But if it happens 10 times, chances are we work together. We were meeting for lunch and, oh, we're at Italian place. We like Italian place. So now we're going to get pushed ads, which is the third part. Once you have the data, what do you do with it, right? You've got to have a mechanism. And Google, they're doing so good at collecting the data, putting it all together. Like, I can't go, if I go to Amazon and look for something, and then it's over to Facebook, instantly I will see an ad for what I was looking at on Amazon. And when you turn your ad blockers off, I mean, it's just crazy. It's just, they're all, there's cookies, the third party cookies, and yeah. They even make assumptions, too. I mean, I was talking to a friend and he was telling me about some of the data collection that if you ask certain questions. So, you know, one of the scary things is you start, you have children, and they start looking at asking questions online. And eventually those questions are correlated to either physical ailments or, you know, something happening like maybe a teenager's pregnant or something. But they didn't actually ask that question. They asked something similar. But then GPS has pegged them in the vicinity of, say, you know, baby clothing or something. So now they've correlated something. But if you're sharing accounts, now you start getting ads for something that doesn't actually belong to you. It belongs to maybe, say, in your household. Because if your TV is so smart now, now you can look something up on your TV. It's on YouTube. And then you can see all the history, right? So there's these things where, I don't think as a society, we understand how the data is being used to get our attention. And I remember when I was working with someone on an anti-spam product, this was back in the dark ages of email probably 10, 15 years ago. And it would filter things out. And this was a plastic surgeon. He wanted to get, you know, things that had breast augmentation and, you know, male reproductive kind of things. He signed up for those newsletters. But they were just categorized as spam, that type of thing. So, you know, deciphering that information, what you do with it, who has the legitimate need to go ahead and look at that as huge. And I think one thing, I can't, I think the CEO of Apple said that, but anything that you do on the web, if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. You are. Are you paying for Facebook? No. You know, you're the product. You know, your Gmail, they're reading every single, they know, if you want to know who's having an affair with who, ask Gmail. Right? They know, because that's the back door. Everybody, they're not going to use their main account. They're going to have a separate Gmail account. Who's talking to who shouldn't be? Yeah, so that data, again, nothing you put online, you should consider private. I agree. Yeah. And not to say that there are, with encryption, there are ways to do that. But if you're just using what we call a standard commodity commercial service, it's absolutely not secure. And I guess to keep our tinfoil hats on, one thing I'd found, this is a real website. You can check that out. And the link will be down below in the comments. We'll go ahead and put that there. But there is a company called Location Smart. And they're tied into all the major carriers. Yeah. So literally based on this, the cell tower, they can do a triangulation to figure out where your phone is. Not as good as GPS, but it's really close. And so you can put in a phone number of someone and they'll tell you about where that is. So people walk in by a store. You can push them ads for your store, whether using Bluetooth, you know, all these RFID kinds of things. So really amazing. So proximity ads have been, that's been hot for like the last 15 years now. And some people want to know about it, especially if you're a tourist, right? You look at Vegas, you look at here. People want to know when they're walking down the strip what meals are discounted or what times the show is going to start. So in some cases it actually serves a legitimate purpose. But the data collection can be somewhat intrusive. Absolutely. And I was just looking at all the stories here. And it's interesting because almost all of them are negative. Like for instance, like Chili's had a credit card breach. People took credit card data. And the first thing I think is, why are they storing that data? Why do they need to store my credit card number? Run the process. Let me pay for the food I got. And then electronically shred the data. What's the point? What do they get of storing that data? Have anything that's worth stealing? And then, you know, I don't know if you've ever been to Chili's, but there's a little, like a little tablet on your table that you can order things from, you know, has a touch screen and even pay. So you get unsecured devices. Those little skimmers that they will read your card for you. That is just such a recipe. Can you type in your credit card manually? I don't know. And I was there recently and it was a slide. It didn't have the chip part yet. So I think the chip will help, you know, the chip there. Oh, I'm asking because I got those temporary credit card numbers. Okay. Yeah. Tell me more about that. That's interesting. Yeah. So one of the things that my credit card company does is it allows me to associate unique credit card numbers to a master credit card number. And then I can use that unique credit card number with an actual cap limit. So, for instance, if I have a subscription, say it on Netflix, and I associate a temporary credit card number to it, I can put a cap of, say, $30 a month. If they get hacked, I'm out at most $30. And you can cancel it in an instant. Yeah. And it doesn't affect the master account holder. So in the case of Chili's or something like that, you know, it's a little tough when you're at, say, Costco getting gas, but it drastically limits the online vendors that I work with. So I highly recommend that. And what company is that? I really want to... Yeah. Capital one. Capital. I mean, when you told me about that, I was absolutely flabbergasted. You sign up for something, you can say, you know, and it's good for a week. You can use this number and it's... Or maybe one time. It's a one-time purchase, $300. Someone I don't know. So worst thing that can happen is they don't ship what I bought. Exactly. They try to go to a Macy spending spree. You know, it's not going to work. So I think that though, that is the ideal, because it's a mobile app. Yeah. So that is the fantastic of taking the cloud. That's good news. I think that is worth the price of admission at all. I mean, to have that kind of... And when you hear about Facebook, they just deleted 583 million fake accounts. Now, apparently they have about a billion and a half left, but 583 million fake accounts. I mean, how does that happen? I mean, who do you think in this world is... Are those just people that just abandon them? They say they're fake. How many fake accounts do you have? About 18. So you know what some of the challenge I think is all these... And you've probably seen this. You sign up for something. They want to offer a single sign-on experience. No problem, make it easy for you. Just sign in with your Google account or your Facebook account. So I intentionally created a fake Facebook account just so that when I have these subscription stuff, I channel everything over there and I don't care about the ads. Because that's what they're doing, they're just selling data. And I think... I mean, that's something that I've always thought was a million-dollar idea that we use Office 365 in the office. And what I want, whenever you have to sign up for an account, you can just click a button and outlook that says, Give me an account. So it'd be my address, dot, Facebook, whatever, or something. And there are ways you can do that in Gmail. I think if you have your email address and then a plus, anything after the plus is ignored. Then you can create filters and all those kind of things. So the way to do that, natively with an outlook, just give me a throwaway account. I don't want to sign up for this thing, but I want to read the article or something. So just give me a fake account so I can click the confirmation link there. So definitely a huge thing. Did you hear about Netflix? No. So Netflix reported recently, and I don't know if you watch Netflix, but I really like this short series. Do you remember Lost in Space? Kind of. Yeah, Danger Will Robinson. Right? So they rebooted it. Netflix is spending. Is it a prequel? Oh, what's a prequel? Prequel. So what is that? Like happening before Lost in Space? No. Oh, like a storyline before? What's a prequel? Welcome to 2018, Greg. All right. Hello. There's too many terms. So it was like a mini series. I think it was like four or five shows, but it did really well so they're going for a second series. But they're very interesting because when you look at content providers for, say, cable companies, their job is to keep you a customer, and the way they keep you a customer is to continue delivering content that you like, and that requires content providers. Netflix is an online content provider. They're spending about 85% of their revenue or their spend is going to go to their own series. So what they would call Netflix's original series, right? Well, it makes sense. I mean, back in the day, 85% was spent on shipping and buying DVDs. Yeah. Right? And that all changed. Okay, well, again, that's great talk. So we're going to take a short break here and we come back again. We're going to be talking about the small and medium-sized business computer networks. I'm going to start with the internet, work all the way through. We'll see in a few. I'm Jay Feidell, ThinkTech. ThinkTech loves energy. I'm the host of Mina, Marco and Me, which is Mina Morita, former chair of the PUC, former legislator, and Energy Dynamics, a consulting organization in energy. Marco Mangostorf is the CEO of Provision Solar in Hilo. Every two weeks we talk about energy, everything about energy. Come around and watch us. We're on at noon on Mondays every two weeks on ThinkTech. Aloha. Hey, Aloha, everybody. Thanks for joining us on ThinkTech Hawaii. I'm your host, Andrew Lanning, the security guy. I host a program called Security Matters, Hawaii. And I hope you'll join us on Fridays. We air at 10 a.m. And we're going to be talking about those security things that really should be important to you. And maybe get behind the scenes on some things that you may not know about the industry or about products or even about your habits. Security is all about people, processes and products. And we hope to bring that to you in an informative and hopefully a useful way. So, again, 10 a.m. on Fridays, Security Matters, Hawaii on ThinkTech Hawaii. Join me. Thank you. Aloha. Welcome back. If you're just joining us, you're probably watching a video on YouTube so you can rewind just FYI to have that there. Prequel. Yeah. You can watch the prequel to this segment here, our current tech topics. But, again, my name is Matt Darnel here with the lovely Greg Jackson. And we're going to be talking today on Hawaii Tech today about a multi-part series on SMB computer network. There are so many small businesses here in Hawaii, five folks and below, and they really don't understand what's happening in their network. So we kind of want to take our time, work through the network, work through all of the different parts of that. So if we could, if we could bring up the diagram. This is probably a diagram of maybe a 10 or 15 person office there. So up at the top of the middle, we have our internet connection, and that connects into some kind of a router. And the router then goes to this thing we call a switch, and the switch is what everything plugs into. So let's start off with that internet connection. And so we're going to talk about different kinds of interconnect that you might have. The first one we can talk about is DSL. Now DSL is generally provided by a private line, or generally by the phone company, Hawaii Intel is going to find DSL. And that's generally the service of last resort. If unless you're out beyond everything, DSL is available to you. Now it might only be three mag down and 768K up, but DSL is probably the most widely available besides a satellite service that's everywhere for all the rich people. But we have DSL there. So one of the things that I like about DSL is because it has that saturation in the market. A lot of the conversations I had with small business owners would be something like, I know I need internet. I don't know if they have fiber. They may have coax. And then my next question is, do you have phone lines? So one of the best things about being in Hawaii is that I have learned a lot more about infrastructure. I'm used to a lot more fiber. And when I came out here, almost came from... Came from where? Vegas. From Las Vegas? Yeah. Fiber and coax all over. The company I worked for did a really good job of building out the infrastructure. So what you find with the phone lines is that it's very difficult to push the amount of data that people are expecting today. And that's one of the reasons why you have some of the people struggling, I think, businesses to get the data throughput that they need. I think reliability is there. When you look at latency, the phone lines tend to be pretty reliable. They just don't offer the speeds that a lot of customers need. Yeah. And now they'll combine... It used to be two wires. You have a connection. And now they can bond them together. We have multiple connections. That gives you some redundancy. Because one thing that we're... Hawaii tells biggest nemesis is the rain. Some of the copper downtown is from before World War II. And the sewers get flooded just from a big rain and everything else. Why is this big, too, around here? I mean, you get things like, you know, it's raining. My internet's cut off. I don't know what to do. They have to take long shots of Wi-Fi from, you know, maybe the middle of a mountain down to a building that may not have enough bandwidth. So it's really, really interesting. But I think we're going to start seeing, because we're so concentrated, especially in the downtown areas, we're going to see a lot of... I expect a lot of fiber. You've got Hawaii and Tel doing fiber now, right? Yeah. I have Hawaii and Tel and Spectrum at my house, you know, or, excuse me, Hawaii Cincinnati Bell, who's my Hawaii. Tel cells. Yeah, something. I think we talked about this last week, yeah. And have both of those there. So DSL is generally available everywhere. If you have a phone line, you're going to be within reach there. Now, let's talk about fiber. So when would fiber not be a good idea? When you don't have it. When you don't have it, yeah. The number one nemesis of fiber is that install cost. Yeah. Because sometimes, I mean, a fiber install is thousands, tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars. If they have to trench, you know, they can only have to trench 10 feet, but they got to worry about the pipes under the ground. I've known people that... I'm not going to say their name, but the company that couldn't do it, Hawaii and Tel. But they were literally right across Bishop Street. They were trying to get fiber. Right across, I mean, within, as the crow flies, 300 feet, but they couldn't deliver fiber from the CO downtown right at Bishop Street. They couldn't deliver them fiber. The conduits were full, you know, and all this old cable from before World War II. So that installation, if you can get fiber and you can afford it, you know, that type of thing, it really is the way to go. It's a light, you know, it's light going through the fiber optic cable. So we're not really affected. Lights. I mean, there's all kinds of wavelengths being used. And that's probably one of the biggest challenges that fiber is going to have, where copper phone lines, they had to use existing phone lines to push different technologies, but the phone line didn't have what I think the... So coax, you know, hopefully we'll touch on that, but that's got certain density to it. Fiber has its own clarity and density to it, the glass that they use. So the challenge is really going to be can they use the existing fiber and how much... How many different frequencies of light can they use to aggregate different channels? It operates very similarly, but the equipment is much more expensive, right? Absolutely, yeah. And that technology, WDM, where they can have different colors of light. It's not just white light. There's blue light and red light and all the different colors, and they can tell, you know, one from the other. So as opposed to just sending one signal at a time... Dense wave division multiplex or something crazy, right? DWDM or something, yeah, absolutely. So with that, so fiber... Now, you won't get that to the home, but like on the fibers that go from here to the mainland, I mean, that is so expensive to put one mile of trans, you know, oceanic kind of cable. They've got to squeeze every little bit that they can out of that. So yeah, so fiber, if you can get fiber and it's already installed, there's so much capacity in the fiber that for the carrier to split you off some of that, then it's very little DB loss on light when you're splitting it, so it's very easy to channel it when you get there. Absolutely. Okay, so let's talk about coax and have that. And I remember the days where the cable companies were doing real well because they could just run one coax up to a cell tower and all the people were doing were making phone calls. But they can't do that kind of thing anymore. So is coax... Are you seeing that a lot around? Well, coax is still really popular because of the quality. Obviously, if the coax has been sitting around or there's too many pieces that were kind of spliced up, then that becomes a problem with DB loss. But coax is still pretty hot. I mean, we've got coax being delivered with DOCSIS 3.1. Bandwidths are still extremely very high. I think we were talking in the office about some of the speed changes that might be coming, right? Yeah, so... And when you say the DB loss, that'll be the resistance, you know, the signal degrades kind of like when you yell at somebody. The farther they are away, the harder it is to hear that signal. And that DOCSIS is the technology that lets them put the digital data because it was first installed. It was all analog TV. That's what cable was. God, is that late 70s when it really started? A few years ago, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And now they're converting all the... Now I'm hearing the advertising that they're going to convert all the analog signal to digital. I think the analog's gone. Yeah. There's no more analog... I'm getting on my TV where they say that you have to... Oh, they're still warning you they're going to cut it off? Yeah. They want to use that bandwidth... Yeah, right. ...for the digital. Exactly. Yeah, so what they're able to do now, the reason they've got improvements is they have these channels, they're able to put them together and just bond them together. So it's like lanes on a highway. Instead of only one lane now, you can have five lanes. So it used to be, you know, you could five mech down would be... But like the lowest service they're going to have pretty soon is 200 mech down. That's crazy. And be able to do that, yeah. So cable is a very good alternative there. And then how about cellular? Have you ever worked with... There's a device called the CradlePoint where you can like take a SIM, the same SIM card, that little chip that you put in your phone, put that into a router. So when you talk about SMBs, this is really, really popular, popular as a backup device. You're absolutely right. Yeah. And sometimes they're in the same device. So I have my internet coming from, you know, from either from Fiber or from cable or DSL. And then all of a sudden, if that goes out, then it's going to automatically switch over to the wireless. So it's generally you pay by the bit. The more you download, the more you pay. So very few people use it for a primary data service. But yeah, as a backup... Sprint. They'll give you all you can eat. Yeah. Absolutely right. And then probably the last one here is microwave. And that's generally more of a point-to-point. Like if you're all the way at the end of point, Fiber install would just be crazy. Birds going by, rain, dust. Yeah. So yeah, you have that microwave antenna and do those kind of things. So yeah. So definitely a lot of choices that you have with there. I think we all would agree. If you can get fiber, that would definitely be the way to go. And then cable and then DSL would kind of be of the three. That would kind of be the order that you would go into. And generally, if you have a phone line, you're going to be able to get the DSL there. So yeah, so today, again, thank you for tuning in. This is White Tech today. We're talking about small business networking. We kind of started at the top where the internet comes in. Then next week, we're talking about the routers and then the switches and work our way all the way down. So that one, you understand what you have in your network. You can make intelligent decisions on what you're doing, what you're buying. We want to help you save money, those kind of things. So if you have any questions, definitely go down to the comments, post it. Greg watches it every five minutes. He checks in for that. So thank you again, Greg. Thank you for coming. Have a great day. Aloha.