Technology Cold War! Upgrade Your Passwords and OTP.mp4

[00:00:00] There is a technology war out there right now, and most people don't realize it. I don't think people are talking about this and this is a very strange subject and is very loosely related to Amazon cell. So you're not going to hear, like, how to grow Amazon sales and this particular podcast. But I felt so strongly after seeing the signs that I wanted to talk about this today so that you are generally warned you need to think about this topic, in my opinion. My name is Stephen Pope. I'm the founder of my Amazon guy. And today we're going to talk about the technology war.
 
[00:00:44] I'm going to start with some examples because I feel like most people are going to think I'm crazy initially when I talk about the subject. Ticktock, great example, because it shows how there's a conflict between two nations, China and the United States. So. All the government entities are like, yeah, China is infiltrating everything with Tic-Tac and they're taking control data and they're stealing people's information. And initially what happened on that timeline was like the government's like, hey, nobody can have ticktock consulting their phones. There was leaks about Amazon doing the same thing. And basically, eventually the government's like, hey, we're going to ban Tick-Tock. Are you going to sell this platform? You can't own a China. And if you think about that, that's never happened before on a technology scale of mass adoption before. This is one large sign of what I'm seeing, there is not a single software application you can log into right now without them shoving down your throat, sign up for OTP one time password. Have you enabled OTP yet? Why? Why is that? And it's because there is so much infrastructure being attacked right now that if you don't have in place, you're you're guaranteed to have a leak. If you look at the last couple of years, this problem's been escalating where we've seen, you know, the biggest the biggest release of personal information was when one of the credit score agencies got hacked, rather.
 
[00:02:28] I mean, I use that word loosely, right? They didn't really get hacked so much as their security just sucked. Right. And then all of a sudden somebody just ran off with all of our information, your Social Security number, every credit source that you have available. Identity theft started spiking. They were supposed to pay people money in this big lawsuit. I didn't see a dime. I don't know if you guys did. And the list goes on from there, the situation. And like the catalyst that made me like want to talk about this was when Amazon's own system completely bonkers, broked. And and this is just one of many things that's been breaking at Amazon, of course. And if you've been listening to the podcast, you're like, OK, Steven's talking about things breaking in Amazon yet again. I get it. But this one's very unique. This is a very unique angle. So I have an agency with 30 employees and half of my agency is in the Philippines. So I had created this very intricate way of having everybody log into our accounts. Right. So I would have half of my accounts on one email address and half in another email address. And then I would have every once OTP code transfer over into my Google Voice text messages, and then I would order for that to the entire organization.
 
[00:03:56] And then I had the whole organization create a filter where it would go into a folder so it didn't spam their inbox. And then any time you need to check the folder boom, nobody had to talk to anybody to log in to Amazon. It was fantastic. I was so thrilled about how smart I was, quote unquote, to set this up and to make super efficiency. Like I am a guy who just loves efficiency. I hate any efficiency. 30 seconds a day of wasted time adds up kind of guy. And then you times that by thirty employees and that really adds up in my thirty seconds. Might be somebody else's two minutes just from technology woes. So I had triggered all of these ATP's to go through an email system. And the moment, you know, a moment an employee was an employee anymore, they didn't get it because that, you know, I took away their email access, you name it. So it was fine from a security standpoint. Well, a couple of weeks ago, Amazon started capping the number of tips to a receipt of a particular phone number to forty. And you no longer saved your your saved log in if you switch logins. So I have multiple emails across are a couple hundred accounts that we manage. And so everybody switching emails constantly. And so it would trigger a notepad by 9:00 a.m.
 
[00:05:24] boom. All forty OTP codes were used and and we couldn't get in any further. And so of course there's many different workarounds we attempted we had, you know, use Chrome browser for one log and use Internet Explorer for another, although hey iis going away nobody cares about i.e. Firefox four for a third log. You get the idea. But it just wasn't a perfect system. And when half my employees are logging in at the time I want to go to sleep. I did not want my slack blowing up with hey, I need a code for logging into this email address. Just wanted, wanted me to punch my fist through the wall in aggravation. So I saw that as another big giant sign. I, I personally and then I also had you know, I have a discover card and I got hit with hey, our system has been breached email. Right. And we've seen a lot of that lately. A month ago, Google started sending me emails about all of the collaboration that they have with all the password leaks. So if your email is on a particular system and you have a safe password with them, they know that your email and password has been compromised and then they send you a notice and then you can review your security protocols like.
 
[00:06:37] That is a great service. Good job, Google on that, but also very alarming because this free service is now trying to say, hey, go change all these passwords. So if you don't currently have a password manager in place, I got to tell you, this is something you have to jump on right now. I like both last pass and Google password manager. I wouldn't trust anything else if you got like a Samsung phone. Do not trust Samsung. Do not trust any company. That's not their primary job, isn't data. Do not trust them. I guarantee you that every technology system in the next one or two years is going to get hacked. All of them, every single one of them. But because Google has invested, I don't know, I'm making this up billions of dollars probably in into having their own dedicated Internet lines and everything else and security and protocols. They are probably going to be like their own nation state at some point and able to defend their their turf. Well, everything else crumbles. I mean, you look at the United States technology infrastructure right now and the I'm going to go out on a limb and say this probably going to offend a few people, but the people who have the least amount of technology skills are running our government's technology sector.
 
[00:07:59] I'm talking about at the federal level, the state level, et cetera. You know, they're the lowest paying security jobs. And quite frankly, I wonder if the government also wants us to not have good security so that, you know, problems happen. They throw and then they ram down the Patriot Act down our throats. And hopefully that's not a polarizing issue. I think everybody should be anti Patriot Act. And if you don't know anything about that, it's basically a way for the government to spy on us. Not a good thing. And we even saw a couple of years back, Apple was fighting the FBI to unlock a phone and that case went national and viral and whatnot. So all of these things are adding up. I have never seen this amount of commotion before in the technology space and Amazon, even in like a month or two ago, they had their big accelerate conference and they announced that they suspended 2.5 million accounts this year for potential fraud. Now, I bet you five hundred thousand of those were probably actually like authentic sellers that just got screwed by Amazon system every single day. We are getting in emails about bad fault's suspensions. They're really terrible. But in any case, seeing two point five million accounts suspended that, you know, Amazon just kind of like mentioned that in passing and accelerate.
 
[00:09:29] And they're like, yeah, we're trying to protect the customers. And we suspended 2.5 million accounts. Whoa. That's a lot of accounts. So if there's 2.5 million fraud accounts being opened in 2020 alone, that tells you how bad the problem is getting. And if I if I seriously went through my entire software stack right now, every single software website program has been ramming OTP down our throats. And so when I when I picture this altogether, you know, a few podcasts ago, I mentioned that I felt like the taxi driver of e-commerce. And this is very much in line with that theme where where I don't actually know anything. I'm just making the taxi driver observation where I'm like, OK, I've seen 20 different OTP systems get into my taxi cab and they're like, hey, take me to land. And I drive them to land and they get out and they're like, cool, thanks for taking me to lands. And every single ride for the past couple of weeks has been going to land. Well, as a taxi driver in this in this metaphor here, it's very obvious something's going on at this building location. And and there is quite frankly, I'll go ahead and say there is technology, Cold War going on right now and the winner is probably going to be China. That's not a good thing.
 
[00:11:06] And I think we will finally see some polarization lash back like currency war. Yeah, like you, me at home. We didn't really we didn't really feel that war. Right. Like we did in the sense that, you know, our cheap products are coming from China and our manufacturing industry has been destroyed for the past few decades. But it didn't like directly correlate to, quote unquote suffering. I believe this tech Cold War that we're. Entering right now is going to cause suffering, you are going to have your identity stolen and you're going to have your systems hacked if you if you currently have a password that's like first letter, capitalized word, exclamation point, that is bad. Like right now, go and change that. Go do the auto generated security codes that are like 12 digits long from last pass or Google password and get that crap fixed and have one password per account. Do not share a password on any single account, your bank, your credit card, your Amazon seller, central account, nothing. And and if if you have shared your passwords with anybody on any platform, you need to be very careful and you need to mitigate your risks.
 
[00:12:30] Now, the nice thing about Solar Central is that anybody who logs into your account can be given a secondary user invite and take advantage of that. So at my Amazon guy, we do not like logging into a super amount of of an account. Now we have two to set up any sort of API connections. Right. If we're setting up like a helium tan or or a feedback is connection, we have to log into the super admin, but we don't like doing it. And kind of the direction we're heading is setting up like a zoom screen share call where where we just walk the the client through it instead of logging in ourselves. So we don't like logging or sharing passwords. We like having our own user infrastructure. So that way we can keep our own data protected as well as our clients data protected. As another case example of this, really shady agencies out there will will register brand registry under their own email addresses, making it impossible for you as the brand owner to control it.
 
[00:13:32] And and I have never done that, like never, ever done that.
 
[00:13:38] It is really terrible if if you do not have control of your own brand registry. And I know it's a little off topic, so I'm going to move on. But we've also seen 5G roll out this year. Now, there's a ton of conspiracy theories about the how that's related to Koed. I want to be very clear. I think that crap is crazy. I am not a conspiracy theorist. I am trying to make this podcast about man. I'm noticing all of these tech issues clear across the Web. We've also seen Amazon system just completely crumble in the last 60 days. I don't know if these two things are correlated, but they definitely feel like something is connected. And and so I'm I'm making the the taxi driver observation that something is happening. And and then I know that we've seen in the news about the tick tock scenario. And I know that China will do anything it can to put food on the table for its citizens and they want to be the powerhouse and in control. We also saw the control of the Internet get seated from the United States and now it's more of this international collaboration. And so all of these things are not good for the United States. And some might argue it's better for the world. But, you know, here in the United States, definitely not best for us.
 
[00:14:55] And in preparation for for doing this podcast, I didn't I didn't read any articles. I just gave it real, just like how I've seen it. But I do have up on my screen an October 1st article from The New York Times. I just pulled it up and it reads, Tensions between China and the U.S. have climbed ever higher in recent months with clashes over Chinese tech companies becoming a huge flashpoint. David Sanger. I don't how to say that the Times national security correspondent joined us for a deal book de-brief call with readers to discuss the battle between Washington and Beijing over tech companies like Huawei and Tic-Tac. Oh, that reminds me the Huawei scenario. And I'm trying to remove the set top of my head. But basically there's certain phones that have chips in them that, like China has like totally corrupted, bad, bad, bad stuff. So some of the highlights from that article, would you let the Chinese or Russians build your F-35 fighters? And of course, of course, the answer that's no Tick-Tock you don't depend on for keeping your economy running in times of conflict, who will control 40 percent of the world's telecommunications? That's really alarming statistic. The Trump administration may have persuaded Britain to bar Huawei from its five G networks. And Europe may also take a harder line on the Chinese telecom equipment maker.
 
[00:16:11] So, like, I just like randomly pulled this up and it's completely topical to what we're talking about, like this inside tech war, tech, Cold War specifically. And so the reason why you might call it a Cold War versus like an actual hot war, I guess I don't even know what you'd call hot war, but it's basically where there's like two ships passing in a night and they're firing at each other, but they're not. Trying to ram each other and they're not going to board each other and they're not going to send pirates with swords clashing metal onto your boat, but they're definitely going to do some stuff like, I don't know, leave landmines, ocean mines, whatever the equivalent is to that in the ocean, trying to damage your boat. And they're they're going to send bacteria eating wood to, you know, make your boat sink. Like, that's the kind of things that happen in the Cold War where it's like, hey, I'm going to damage you, but I don't want to get caught because I don't want to escalate this. But I also want to win and I don't want you to know. But I know, you know, and that's the kind of Cold War I think we're entering. So. And if you listen to this and you're like, OK, that's cool, but what do I do about it? I think I've been very clear on that.
 
[00:17:21] But as a as a really strong double push on this, control your passwords, reset them all, have a last pass in place, or Google password manager at the very least, do enable those systems. As dang annoying as they are. Go ahead and bite the bullet on them and have them enabled. Amazon is a tech leader and they had in place long ago. I don't even know how long ago, maybe two years ago. And everybody else is now catching up to them and that's when you know that crap is about to hit the fan. So my name is Stephen Pope. I'm the founder of my Amazon guy. I really appreciate you guys listen to me on this random technology subject, but I think it affects us all. And if tech starts going haywire, your Amazon sales can definitely be affected, even though it's not directly correlated. I still feel like so strongly I had to speak about this, do your own research and see what you're seeing out there on this technology. FYI, I'm going to end with a testimonial I had with a coaching call today. Thank you very much for listening. My name is Stephen Pope on the founder of my Amazon guy. What's been your experience with my Amazon guy?
 
[00:18:32] Yeah, after the first year from today. But we have a lot to do to make that customer experience, even though that experience with guys were not that bad. But for some reason, the problem that popped up and I was able to solve it during the or even was able to solve the problem solved through at least how quickly it was done. So Stephen knows a lot of tricks that I did. Absolutely none of them consider it ever been this experience. I'm really grateful to Stephen for solving this problem. So I don't know how long time it will take you back to Amazon, because I created iTunes and I waited for almost half a day. My response was really critical groups that were through and courier job.
 
[00:19:24] And we can help you to book a coaching call today with my Amazon guide to help grow your sales and improve your traffic and conversion rates.