Welcome back from holiday relaxation and straight into the heart of innovation—our latest episode is a toast to the future, beginning with a heartfelt hoorah for hitting a whopping 100 downloads. Feel the gratitude as we also prepare to take you inside the bustling halls of CES, sharing a must-visit tip for tech enthusiasts. Meanwhile, I'll serve up a slice of inspiration courtesy of Mr. Beast, proving that keeping your information diet diverse can spark creativity in unexpected ways.
Ever chuckled at a Wi-Fi debacle? You'll be in stitches as we recount a neighbor's Internet 'ungratefulness' before steering into the serious lanes of wireless network security. The digital battlefield is ever-evolving, and this episode paints a vivid picture of cybersecurity's unseen skirmishes. Through anecdotes and a breakdown of the latest analysis tools, we equip you with the knowledge to shield your digital territory from potential invasions.
Lastly, we thread together an intriguing tapestry of Wi-Fi tales, from AirEye's mile-high strides in security to the unlikely story of Michoacan drug cartels wireless internet providers. As we gear up for the live buzz of CES, join us for a conversation that stretches from the starry orbits of SpaceX's ambitions to the professional pathways carved out on LinkedIn. Your next tech insight or career leap could be just one listen away.
Welcome back from holiday relaxation and straight into the heart of innovation—our latest episode is a toast to the future, beginning with a heartfelt hoorah for hitting a whopping 100 downloads. Feel the gratitude as we also prepare to take you inside the bustling halls of CES, sharing a must-visit tip for tech enthusiasts. Meanwhile, I'll serve up a slice of inspiration courtesy of Mr. Beast, proving that keeping your information diet diverse can spark creativity in unexpected ways.
Ever chuckled at a Wi-Fi debacle? You'll be in stitches as we recount a neighbor's Internet 'ungratefulness' before steering into the serious lanes of wireless network security. The digital battlefield is ever-evolving, and this episode paints a vivid picture of cybersecurity's unseen skirmishes. Through anecdotes and a breakdown of the latest analysis tools, we equip you with the knowledge to shield your digital territory from potential invasions.
Lastly, we thread together an intriguing tapestry of Wi-Fi tales, from AirEye's mile-high strides in security to the unlikely story of Michoacan drug cartels wireless internet providers. As we gear up for the live buzz of CES, join us for a conversation that stretches from the starry orbits of SpaceX's ambitions to the professional pathways carved out on LinkedIn. Your next tech insight or career leap could be just one listen away.
All right, no time like the present. Let's go ahead and get started and see if I can have everything configured the way it's supposed to be. I'm gonna go ahead and click this to enable me on Instagram as well. Let's see how well that goes over. Sometimes it works pretty well and sometimes it does not work well at all. You know it's. Let's see. Here's my mic. If I'm going this way, instagram puts me in this weird frame over here, so I guess it's only gonna be half of my face today. But you know, I don't know. I wish there was a way to move it around a little bit. I think that that would be pretty cool. So we're gonna go ahead and click that button, go live on Instagram, see what happens over here. Look, it says I'm going live waves with wireless nerd Fantastic Drew in the morning. Wireless nerd is live. Oh hey, I'm a nerd, what's up? Anyway, good afternoon everyone. I hope you had a happy new year.
Speaker 1:I took the week off last week unannounced, you know, first year, podcasting and doing all this stuff. So just you know, bear with it. I guess it was a what a week man. Holidays were nuts. The whole holiday season has been pretty incredible. Lots of things going on family and friends and people, and you know too much of this and not enough of that and not enough sleep, and you know it's been a hectic couple of weeks either way. Now it is January 4th. Things are starting to get back to some semblance of normal. Got a lot of work done this morning, saw a bunch of stuff coming across from the work side, but I thought what better day than today to make sure that I get waves with wireless nerd done for you, all my loyal listeners, all 17 of you, or however many. It is today the first big milestone for me. Fantastic, I appreciate it. The last podcast had 100 downloads, so super excited about that. I appreciate it. Don't know who you are, but I'm glad that you are listening to it. Hopefully it's imparting some different perspective on what you do. Don't know if there's any wisdom in there or not, but at least it's giving you something you may not have heard about. And that was fascinating to me, that whole concept of something that you hadn't heard about. I was watching a video with my son. I'm a big fan of Mr Beast, first of all, so love Mr Beast. Now, one of the things that he was talking about was. He has a whole group of people who go out and find things that he has never heard about to keep his information diet full, and I hope that at least I try and mention little things here and there. They're just random and odd because the stuff that you don't know about can inspire you in so many different ways. So hopefully you hear something that might inspire you here on our trusty little program.
Speaker 1:Speaking of our program, I do want you to take note next week is gonna be a little bit different. It's gonna be a lot of fun, but a little different. What we're gonna do is we're gonna be broadcasting live from CES. So I get out there on Monday, I'll be out there Tuesday, wednesday, thursday and then Friday, and at CES we're gonna try and do this live broadcast not just for waves, but we're working with Unplug Connectivity, which is a channel specifically about wireless, and it's done by a bunch of different employees from Cisco and they got together and put this thing out there and we've decided to team up and we're gonna go live. Since I'm gonna be at CES, I'm gonna look for different things in the way that they impact the wireless industry. They sent me some really cool microphones so hopefully be able to get some interviews with some people. I've got a couple of friends that have already said that they wanna stop by and do a quick interview, so that's gonna be neat. So next week we're gonna make the announcement. It's probably going to be on the 11th. We were going to do it at 10 in the morning on the 10th. The problem is that's only the first day of the show, so I'm not really sure how much I'm going to see. So I might go live then, but I'll probably also or only go live on the 11th, which will be a week from today, and hopefully I'll have seen enough of the show to understand really what's happening.
Speaker 1:Lots of really great things I'm interested in seeing at CES. I know you know the announcement there hasn't been a Windows 12 announcement, but there's a lot of talk about what Windows is doing with AI and how the chip set manufacturers are getting behind them and the whole thing is revolving around processing of AI on the machine itself, and so I know that there's going to be this whole AI thing happening at CES. I'm not really sure which direction it's going to be coming from. Nvidia is talking about some new chip sets that they're going to release that. There's rumor to be releases out there lots of phone stuff that's happening out there. So I'm curious to see how the AI, what the AI message coming out of CES is going to be. Obviously, there's going to be some cool TVs and some dishwashers and everything else.
Speaker 1:And if you're going to CES, or if you've never been to CES, or if this is your first year going to CES, what I would say is one of my favorite parts of the entire show isn't at the Vegas Convention Center, it's actually at the Sands Convention Center at the Venetian. It's basically the basement and if you've ever been there for for any, you know. Any event, aws was just there and HP has their Discover event there and there's all these events that happen there at the Venetian. I think Cisco does some stuff there as well. If you know where the meals are, where the cafeteria normally is, on that first floor down, like in the basement of the Venetian, that is one of the most incredible places in all of CES.
Speaker 1:What they do there is it's all the countries that have sponsored their pavilions and brought a whole bunch of entrepreneurs over to talk about their products and put them in place, and you get to see stuff that. That is the. The is the utmost, you know, forefront of technology, and that's basically happening on one side. On the other side, it's all the people that want to go to CES to make the connections. But I'm assuming the booths are less expensive there because it's all the really, really, really early startups and so it's really it's a really fun place to go.
Speaker 1:If you're trying to look for something that's new or innovative or something that's going to spark some creativity, that is a really good place to go. It's one of my favorite places to go. I had ignored it for a couple of years and then my business partner came up and he goes Drew, you gotta go check this out, man. And we went down there and it was insane. So if you're going to CES or you've, if you're looking for an excuse to go that bottom floor of the Venetian, it is awesome. It is totally, totally awesome.
Speaker 1:You get all the big stuff at the convention center. You know the cars and I don't know what's happening there. They've been talking about flying cars and flying taxis for a couple of years and I think we're just starting to see some of that come out, but I'm really keen on understanding what's happening in the wireless world, especially since so much of the connectivity that's providing access to all these consumer electronics is going to be based on wireless. So that's what I'm going to be doing out CES, we're going to go live waves with wireless nerd and unplug connectivity those two podcasts coming together for one. It's going to be really, really cool. I can't wait to do that. It's going to be the first cross promo, if you will, so I'm really excited. Anyway, so onto a couple of different things that are happening, new now and next. I'm not going to use an excuse that was a holiday, but it was a holiday, so I'm not really sure what all was happening.
Speaker 1:A couple of things that popped into my head that I thought were pretty interesting is number one on LinkedIn lots of moves, seeing lots of moves in the industry, and I think you know what happens. You notice that your network gets updated pretty frequently, but it seems like we're in a season right now, season of change, and there's a couple of things happening. One of the ones to take note that I looked at and I'm not saying this has anything to do with anything is I saw a couple of key people from Cambium Networks leaving and moving to other locations, and I thought that that was interesting. I also saw some people coming over to Cisco who hadn't been there in a while, you know. It's been really interesting to watch who's bouncing around from place to place. There were some you know and again it's all in your bubble. Right, it's who you've worked with or who you've worked for, but definitely cool to see some changes happening.
Speaker 1:I'm celebrating my one year anniversary with the new organization, so that's pretty cool. It's been a fun year. But I love seeing where people are going on LinkedIn, especially people that I know, because that opens up opportunity for everyone and not just like job opportunity, right, but opportunity where you get to help them or maybe they get to help you and finding new things to uncover to help, you know, make sure that all of us are continuing to grow in our careers. So people moving around the industry was number one. That's that flag. That is new Number two. I thought this was pretty cool.
Speaker 1:I'm using a Canon G7X here that I'm trying to dial in with the with the focus, but it works pretty well and I've noticed there was a news article that came out about camera companies who were looking to fight the rise of AI generated images by embedding digital fingerprints and digital signatures into their photos, and so this was a really cool article talking about how Nikon, for instance, plans to start offering mirrorless cameras with authentication technology built in for photojournalists and other professional photographers. The technology is going to include tamper resistant digital signatures that have the date, the timestamp, when the photo was taken, where the photo was taken and who the photographer was. So a really cool way to check the authenticity of digital imagery. And that is just like. There's a whole other podcast I do with my wife where we talk about what's going on in the world and being a parent and fake news and you know what is fake and how much of it's generated and being able to make sure that the imagery that you're seeing is authentic imagery it's not AI generated. I think is going to be something that's coming up in the future, so I'm interested to see if any of that is going to be talked about this year at CES. But I think it's a step in the right direction, and this has a group of news organizations, camera makers and technology companies have joined together to create a web tool called Verify for checking the authenticity of images for free. If the image has a digital signature, the site will display the date, location, other credentials for the image. So I think that that's pretty cool. So again, that's also in the news section and this one's kind of tongue in cheek.
Speaker 1:In the news section, a new access point was introduced. Yesterday or day before I saw that it popped up on my news feed. Ubiquity has introduced a brand new Wi-Fi 5 access point. You heard me correctly. They introduced a new Wi-Fi 5 access point, which is fantastic, considering that seven just started getting a ratification. So I'm not sure what the play is there. Maybe they had some old chips there trying to get rid of, but they've introduced a new AP based on technology from three years ago. So never, never, never take a chance to stop and reread something. We'll see where that goes. It's IP67 rated for indoor or outdoor use, which is kind of cool. It can be used with either one, but don't understand the move with Wi-Fi 5.
Speaker 1:We'd love to see a comment on why Wi-Fi 5 was chosen for this new AP announcement and the other thing it's called the Swiss Army Knife access point or something like that Isn't there. I'm wondering if there's like a trademark infringement or is there something out like can you call something a Swiss Army Knife Like can that be the actual product name? Anyway, it's a little bit early for April Fools, but I definitely that had some strong April Fools vibes around it. Wi-fi 5 in 2024 called the Swiss Army Knife. Oh, okay, I guess that works Anyway. So that's what I have for new.
Speaker 1:What's going on now? Have you seen the neighbor? This is what? This is my note to myself at three o'clock in the morning. Have you seen the video of the neighbor who's asking for the Wi-Fi password, saying that the neighbor was being unreasonable when they broadcast outside of their walls? I thought that this was such a cool video and I'll put it up on my Instagram, on the wireless nerd Instagram. It's just, it seems like it's a joke and I just I watched it for far too long. I don't think I got all the way to the end before I was just, you know, face-palming so hard. But essentially, this neighbor goes over and is having a conversation with his younger neighbor over there you know Ring Doorbell or whatever it is and he's saying hey, you put a password on your Wi-Fi and you know, I think you're being unreasonable.
Speaker 1:Once your Wi-Fi leaves your walls, it's property of the public, so don't lock it down. You know it's outside, it's for public consumption. And the person was trying to explain no, it's still my Wi-Fi, I broadcast it. And the guy says well then, just lock your doors tighter and make sure that your Wi-Fi doesn't leave your windows, because as soon as it gets outside then it's in the public domain and you know, and you should. You should give me your password because I've been using it for so many years and it's a phenomenal video.
Speaker 1:But again, from the idea of different perspectives on things, there's some like I feel like there's something there, and I don't know what it is, but I feel like there's something there about once you broadcast outside of your walls, then Then is it? Is it public? I mean, it sounds so dumb to even question it, but I think that that's the part to me that I think is fascinating. It's like this person's like really really was adamant about the fact that once your signal leaves your Four walls or your physical area, then it's, it's in the public domain, password protected or not password protected. And, man, it really got me thinking about, about where you're broadcasting, how you're broadcasting. You know I have a box sitting behind me on the floor. That's been sitting there for for a really long time and it's a. It's a cybersecurity analysis tool for wireless networks and I know I know I'd like they sent it and I haven't set it up yet and it makes me think about what the future is going to be for people that are attacking wireless networks and the example that they use. Is that what they, what they? You know it's like.
Speaker 1:It's like when you had the war and everyone's running toward each other with bayonets on the end of their rifles and they're gonna, you know, they're getting ready to fight and then all of a sudden, this airplane flies over head and drops bombs and that's you know. Everyone's looking at the person in front of them. Everyone's looking at the attack that they see. What they're not looking at is the attacks that they don't see and how much security is happening when you're protecting what you don't see. And there's a great class coming up. There's a flipper zero class coming up at WLPC and flippers been running advertisements all over the place, which has been really interesting. I had a friend of mine send me a message last night saying hey, have you ever heard of this? It's so fascinating that flippers mass marketing this, but at the same time you've got senators and congress people who are like we need to shut this down because of the amount of attacks that you can do with this tool. It's it's really scary and if you look at how that's proliferating, you know the security industry. I'm interested to see what DEF CON is gonna look like this year and the amount of wireless security Vulnerabilities and wireless security attacks that take place. Because if you, if you think about every traditional organization, it organization, whatever it is, they're not necessarily looking at what's happening in there, they're looking at what they think is happening. So, yeah, you get spectrum allies, go two gig, five gig, six gig, no big deal. But what about the person who's out there? Just blanket, you know, carpet bombing the wireless space if you will.
Speaker 1:I did this demo at a B-Sides conference here locally where I did what's referred to as RF painting or spectrum painting. And if you haven't done that, it's really fun. Take a hacker RF and you do some stuff to it and you make it. You know, draw a design in the spectrum. It's pretty neat. I. I took like some dictator photo and put it on there because it just looked, you know, menacing.
Speaker 1:But what happens when people are coloring outside the lines and doing things that they're not supposed to be doing. I mean, that's like an attack, right, it's, they're not attacking where you think they're gonna attack. This is the whole. You know you wear a suit of armor to make sure when the person attacks you they don't. You know they don't knife you in the chest. But what happens when they, you know, chop your legs out from underneath you? You know it's we're, as an industry, wireless needs to do more to really spread and evangelize about what can be done from the wireless perspective and how. If all you're doing is you're monitoring ports and you're monitoring network, you know resources and everything else. So that's good, it's good, don't get me wrong but what are you doing to protect yourself from wireless attacks?
Speaker 1:Hang on, let me show you something. Cause this box. Let me show you. I mean mine as well. Right, this is the New Year's special. All right, let me see what I got here. This is a pretty fun box, let's see.
Speaker 1:So there's all these little sensors. Right, you place these sensors all over the place and they're basically all. They are listeners, all they are ears and eyes, and they all call back across your network. They all communicate with each other and they mesh with each other and they call back into each other to make sure that they can hear what's going on and they report what's going on in the RF spectrum. I got like a whole, a whole box of these. Look at this, look at this. There's like 10 of them. I think they shouldn't be like 10 of them, anyway.
Speaker 1:So take all these sensors and you deploy them everywhere and then, once you deploy them, you you make sure that they can all hear each other and then they report back and they they run the entire gamut of the spectrum, right? So you know if someone's trying to attack a door system or they're trying to attack wifi and the thing that they like to talk about. Is that what you do? And I keep saying they, because I honestly, I forgot their name. That's all I have out that box and I'm going to look them up right now and they just face palm drill hard, but I'm going to find it out and I'm going to share it with you. It's more fun if I forget the name. I guess so bad at this, man. This is why people don't send me all the free stuff, right? You need to send a big sign that says what it is. But unfortunately, when they send those, those sample units, there was no label on them that I was looking for. But basically, before I look it up, let me keep explaining it Basically.
Speaker 1:What they do is they talk about how, if you know, you know if you get on show Dan, which there's an API to, there's a CLI for show Dan, I learned this week, I had no idea. Anyway, you get on show Dan and you find some vulnerability in a printer, for example, and that printer sits across the street from a bank. And what you do is you find out that if you can get into that printer because it's on show Dan, you come in through the back door and that printer has a wireless chipset. Then you can use the wireless chipset in the printer to attack the bank across the street over over wireless. Instead of going into the bank and attacking from the network side, you do it from across the street. And so the same.
Speaker 1:You know if you go to show Dan and if you don't know what show Dan is, congratulations, you just learned something that's going to. You know, take care of you for the next couple of hours while you look up your city's. You know facilities and everything that are out there. So show Dan gives you the ability to find vulnerabilities of things that are not vulnerabilities, but they show devices that are connected to the public internet. So think about IoT devices that are publicly connected, that aren't firewall, that aren't blocked, and Shazam. Now you have access to all these different devices and you can find out which ones are listed and compare them to list of vulnerabilities to see what's going on. And this is this is a huge thing, because it gives you the ability to understand what's happening in the IoT world. And then how do you leverage that to use that as an attack against something that you're trying to break into right? And we need to understand this because if this is happening, we need to know how to protect this. And if you're not looking at the airwaves outside of two, four or five gig or six gig or 900 megahertz, if you're not looking wider, then maybe you're not seeing everything that's happening.
Speaker 1:So give me a second. Let me dig up the name of the, of the security company. Where is it Securing the air? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I got to find it. I got to find it, man. I feel so bad. If you're listening and you know me and you know what the company is. Man, please save me from. Save me from myself sitting here getting into trouble with people that are that are super nice. Let's see. Nope, nope, not list. Nope, hasn't listed yet. Oh, my goodness, it's called, is it AIRI? I think it's AIRI. I didn't want to mess it up, but I'm pretty sure it's AIRI. Hold on, yes, I was right, it is AIRI. Okay, good, good, good. So check out AIRI. A-i-r-e-y-e. This is pretty interesting, man. Those were some early devices of AIRI and if you look up AIRI on the internet, there's a really cool video that basically describes exactly what I was talking about.
Speaker 1:This is there's some great people that have gone over here. I see I'm clicking on their LinkedIn to see who's following them. Francois is following them, shane, anything Francois follows, shout out to Francois. If Francois is following them, you know that you're already behind the times if you follow after Francois. If you find a company that you're following that Francois is not following, dude, like you're doing. Good. A little bit of love there for for my buddies over on the other podcast Cleartosin podcast, by the way.
Speaker 1:So I'm trying to see who. Who all is over here. It's. You know people you may know. There's some I can't remember God, you're gonna kill me, right? I can't remember who it was that went over there, but there was someone that I knew in the industry that moved over here and I was like man, if that person's making that move, then it's going to be pretty good. Anyway, as I ramble, feel free to go check them out LinkedIncom, slash company, slash air I a, I R E Y E, or look them up online air I dot tech, and you can find out more about this information, more information about this product, I think it's. It's really, really cool.
Speaker 1:But again, that started with me looking at this video of a neighbor saying hey, man, you know you're being unreasonable, share your Wi-Fi, it just. These are the types of reasons that I go to CES and I go to, you know, in RF and I go to all these different shows is to to find something that sparks a fascination, and I hope that for the new year you all find things that spark fascination, such as the drug cartels in in Michoacan. Did you guys hear about this? The drug cartels have set up their own Wi-Fi service and they have enforcers going on around the town to get people to sign up to their wireless ISP and that's how they're making money. Roughly 5000 people have been forced to pay ex exorbitant fees by a drug cartel to use their makeshift internet service, and then what they were doing is they were going and knocking down towers from like Telmax and all these other places, so they were taking down any any of the incumbents and making it so you could only use their wireless service in Michoacan. So that was. That was pretty interesting.
Speaker 1:In other international news, the US intelligence officials have determined that the Chinese spy balloon remember that spy balloon last year that flew over it was connected to a US internet service provider and that's how it was communicating information back. Now it's up in the air. Which one it was? But funny enough, there's only a few that it could be. So that was that's pretty fascinating, you know anyway. That was interesting to see that. And then in other news about being up in the air, spacex launched the first six Starlink satellites. So it'll provide cellular transmissions for customers of T-Mobile and other carriers. So we're getting close to to no dead zones. I guess is what the key is there. But speaking of, let's move out of RF and let's talk about something interesting in in a different space, but similar RGB OLEDs could push light-based Li-Fi network speeds to a hundred times Wi-Fi's limit, research shows.
Speaker 1:Now, this is interesting because when Li-Fi first started out, it was like, oh man, this is kind of weird. You know they're, they're, they're, they're changing the, you know they're cycling the lights very rapidly and very quickly to transmit data over the lights. Some of them are fiber optics, but in free space, right. So it was like, okay, I can see that. But then you know, the early test shows these lights that you didn't see them blinking, but you could kind of see them blinking and you're like, man, that's got to be pretty annoying. Well, now, not only you know, they've gotten past that to where you, you're not able to tell if the lights are, even you know, blinking, because they're, they're. They're doing it on different, specific, different visible light frequencies. And so now, using RGB OLEDs in place of a single color lighting, a key issue with interference and visible light Li-Fi networking has been addressed. So now they're saying that using the full spectrum and using only specific frequencies or specific, specific visible light frequencies in that spectrum, that this is going to make it almost a hundred times faster than Wi-Fi.
Speaker 1:Now, I know what you're thinking and this is the first thing that I thought. Right, it's like man. But you know what happens to everyone who's using Wi-Fi when the lights are off. And that's kind of one of those questions where it's like you know well, how often are you working with the lights off, you know, but yeah, I guess you know, in the middle of the night, you know, sitting down on your tablet or whatever you know doing some work, but normally you're in an office and office space and and it is what it is. And if it means that your, you know, your computer has to be able to see the light or your phone has to be able to see the light in there to get some high speed connectivity, then that's, that's an interesting thing. But Wi-Fi seems like it's been the next biggest thing for almost 20 years. You know and this is interesting a hundred times the speed. So we'll see where that goes. Don't know if there's going to be demos, that at CES, but we'll see.
Speaker 1:In other news, firefly Green Fuels, a company based in Bristol in the UK, has successfully demonstrated the development of an aviation fuel made from human waste. I'm not bullshitting you, human waste. Those are the company's claims. Independent tests by regulators in the aviation industry have also found the newly developed fuels identical to that used in jet engines. And that is what's next. I've covered what's now, I've covered what's new, I've covered what's next, and I've talked way too long about rambling and having fun. But definitely I think the moral of the story is be aware of what's going on in the atmosphere around you, not just what's going to attack your wireless networks from where you think you know it's coming from, but now, with the advent of li-fi and that coming into the market, who knows where? You know, who knows what those threats and attacks are going to look like Laser beams, I don't know.
Speaker 1:But I hope that, whatever you do, I hope you have a wonderful year. I hope that you had a fantastic holiday spread coming into the new year. We've got CES coming up, NRF coming up Again. We're going to be live at CES Might come to you live from NRF. We're going to be having a really, really good time there, building out a fully functional restaurant, the basement of NRF, and showing how wireless works within the restaurant, the retail sector. So that's gonna be pretty cool. But I hope you have a wonderful year. I hope that you feel inspired Maybe not by this show, maybe you laughed, maybe you didn't laugh.
Speaker 1:Maybe I do inspire you. I hope I do. But I hope that you find inspiration in the most uncanny places to help you do your job better. And I hope that, even when you're doing your job fantastically, I hope to see you on LinkedIn contributing to people's success and watching them move around. So, with that being said, that is Waves for the week of the first week in January 2024. I'll be coming at you live next week from CES. Have a wonderful weekend and we'll talk to you soon, see ya.