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John C. Morley: (00:09)
Hi everyone. I'm John C. Morley, the host of the JMOR Tech Talk Show and inspirations for your life.
John C. Morley: (01:03)
Well, hey guys, it is John C. Morley here, a serial Entrepreneur. Welcome to the JMOR Tech Talk show. Great to be with you guys. It is our first Friday of March. I can't even believe that we are in March. This, like, just blows my mind. Anyway, we have a really great show for you guys tonight. And so you know, thinking about technology, thinking about the pandemic, a lot of businesses surged, and some kind of dropped and someone out of business, unfortunately. one business that really was booming for a while was Zoom. And they've had a job just to keep their shirt on. And so something interesting happened there. Zoom fires their presence. Ouch. Wow. They abruptly fired their president. This is according to Bloomberg. And I got to tell you that he is a former group executive Greg Tom who joined Zoom video communications in June, and he's going to receive severance benefits following his termination without cost. Tom was on a $400,000 annual salary and was to be granted 45 million ladies and gentlemen in stock that would vest over four years. And this is all per Bloomberg. But, you know, we know that Zoom has been cutting staff and a lot of other companies as well. And Zoom's revenue really dropped. I mean, we're talking about a major, major, major drop. I mean, they were Like riding the waves at the top of the cusp, and back in 2022, Zoom's revenue grew by just about 55%. And you know, this was something amazing for them, and they all thought that this would keep happening and it would not end. I knew that Zoom was not going to stay at the top like that. You know, people do want to get in person and meet others. I mean, that's the bottom line. And so when they had to decrease the revenue of the company that basically dropped from, you know, from the one level it before they were at 953 million, and it just sagged all the way down to 562 million. Ouch. I mean, zoom, of course, is not going to answer any questions, and Bloomberg also tried to ask them questions, and they refused. But you know, I think zoom has got to figure out where they're their best. And, you know, people do want to meet with other people in person. There is a place, ladies and gentlemen, to meet online. I think it's great for pre-interviews and stuff like that, and it might even be good for a quick meeting. There is no bond happening on a Zoom call. I'm sorry, guys. Just not happening. And you know the zoom CEO Eric Yuon took a pay cut of 98% or $490,000. And the tech company announced that it was lying of 1300 workers. The president blamed it on the mistake he made. Ouch. Double ouch. And triple ouch. And I want to quote what Mr. Yuon has said. I want to show accountability not just in words but in my own actions. Close quote. He told Stack. He really didn’t plan for the fact that people are going to start meeting and pursuing again. And everyone, there are a lot of networking groups which and then we had all these security issues and things like that, and I think that was the cause of the problem. It wasn’t just the pandemic. It was the fact that they were very negligible in they handled the security issues. I don't know. This is a big problem. And, you know, bottom line, everyone, it's all about the money. Even if they don't say it's about the money or they say it's without, cause it's about the money. And I have to tell you that he had a vision, but then suddenly, he wasn't ready when sales changed. He wasn't ready to adapt to the market. A wise person once told me, John, in order to be successful in the market, you need to be a chameleon. You need to adapt to your surroundings. We've learned this from the military, right? That's why they wear camouflage clothing so that they can blend in and not be seen by the enemy, you know? And Zoom has security issues, unfortunately. You know, they didn't bother to do a lot with it. There were dozens of problems with privacy, and although they're not all serious, some have been fixed, and some have not. And so I think this was the reason, not just the pandemic and people getting back to work because a lot of people I know are still doing meetings. You know, we use Stream Yard, we use another platform, but I mean, we don't use Zoom on a regular basis except for maybe a couple of quick interviews, but it's not where it used to be. We don't even use paid versions of Zoom anymore just because, I don't know, we find that people want to meet in person. And I know a lot of companies out there are saying, Hey, John, you know, is Zoom going to come back? You know, will Zoom come back? It's tough to say after this down in sales for them.
John C. Morley: (07:26)
The problem is that they are not looking at any newer markets, okay? And they've been requiring new minimum inversions every three months. They're having issues with some add-ons. So what is the future of Zoom Communications? What's the future for that? Well, video-enabled persistent space, they all were trying to go there. We saw what happened with Facebook and Meta, how they were the first to allow a courtroom to take their proceedings virtually, and they actually had the idea of the avatars pretty cool, right? Of the 24 analysts, four, that's 16.67%, and Zoom was recommended as a strong buy. Okay? And two, 8.33%, are recommending Zoom as a buy. And so 66.7% are saying Zoom should be a hold.
So again, 24 analysts, of which four are recommending Zoom as a strong buy. Two, 8.33%, are recommending Zoom as just a buy. 16 or 66 points, 66.7% of people recommend Zoom as a hold at one and four, and 17% recommend Zoom as a sell. And 17% are recommending Zoom as a strong sell. So the question everyone has to ask is, will Zoom keep growing? Zoom's operating expenses are really starting to grow exponentially. And that's one thing you don't want to do. You want your sales to grow, and you want to lower the cost of your expenses. And unfortunately, their expenses keep rising and rising and rising, and their growth is still slowing. And so the question is, will Zoom be sold to someone else? Will Zoom stock keep falling? Remember, zoom took over the world when the pandemic was here, and people were flexible. They used Zoom; in fact, they were even giving more time on Zoom, then they cut that back. I think that was a bad move. But again, I know why they did it. They were hurting. And the question is, does Zoom have the aptitude to determine its go-to-market strategy? Obviously not. If they fired the president and they're not planning on hiring another president, that's going to be a serious, serious issue. And I don't know how that's going to happen, but all I can tell you is that video conferencing or the virtual space is changing. As you and I know, when companies are laying off, we still got companies that have people working from home. It's a certain type of environment, but it's no longer just conference calls. It's becoming much more immersive. And by the Zoom CEO taking a $10,000 salary drop, I think he was just trying to preserve his job. I believe he saw the writing on the wall that he was afraid of getting fired. Now, we don't like to talk about that, but let's face it, when the company is not profitable, then we need to figure out what's going on, and we need to move on. And Zoom saw this for a very long time, and they just could not figure out what it was that they needed to do. And the pandemic didn't just end overnight. I mean, it took some time. So I think they should have made some adaptations to what was going on. But they really didn't make some adaptations. They didn't make any agitations. And I think that was a major problem for them. And so by me telling you it was a major problem, I think a lot of people just felt that Zoom was going to be that safe lifeboat, no matter where I am, I could always use Zoom, and some people are using Zoom, but more and more companies I'm talking to are cutting back and just using the free mode. They're using other products. Like Slack out there, we use it a lot. We have Microsoft as a team’s product. You know, we use Stream Yard for all of our commercial recordings. You can use Stream Yard for some types of meeting environments as well. And I think the biggest thing I can tell Zoom is that they didn't have a collaboration with the community and the developers. They tried, but it fell apart. And other platforms, without going into the specifics of how they've done it, really are working day in and day out and not taking that sale for granted. Because let's base it, ladies and gentlemen, just because the software's good today doesn't mean I'm going to renew it next year. There's got to be something that you are doing better than someone else, or there's got to be something that you are keeping me from like a big pain. And we know that people only do things for two reasons to avoid pain and gain pleasure. This is why our hospitals are so extremely busy. So we're going to keep our eye on Zoom, but I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Zoom sells. Are they going to get another president? Probably not. I think right now; they're just trying to stop the bleeding and figure out how we actually make money. And if you're telling me, John, what will Zoom do next to grow? You know, they tried their video engagement center but apparently didn't take off as well as they thought. And the question is, will someone else step into that space? And I believe that if they don't grow, I think someone else will. A lot of other great companies are starting to see the dichotomy of services that we need as a workforce, as people, and as home citizens that we need as a community. And those are the people, ladies and gentlemen, that we're going to buy from, right? Even something as civil age gentlemen as picking who's going to host my podcast, right? There are so many podcast networks out there that want to host, but you know, a lot of them out there are unreliable, and most don't even have phone support. Not that you need that in the tech industry, but my point is that you have to really shop around and figure out what you need and how you will use that tool that they're providing you to get to the next level.
All right? I know; I kind of killed Zoom here. Again, my thoughts and I say sympathies and prayers for the president of Zoom and the other people being laid off because it's never a good time to be laid off. And I think Zoom should have seen the writing on the walls. Hey, wait a minute, our sales are going down. We better do something. Like if you're in a pool, right? And let's say if somebody's drowning, do you suddenly wait for them to yell for help? No. If you see they're not coming up quickly, you're already after they're trying to save them. I think that the problem with Zoom is that they didn't stay proactive. So they could, what I call, take their temperature consistently and then use CCF's continuous constructive feedback. I think that was the biggest problem. And I think that was the problem of the president. He tried to run his organization as something in his mind, but he didn't open up to the rest of the world. And whether you have a one-person company, 10 people, 50, a hundred or a million, you have to interact with your customers and the people working for you. Because if you don't, ladies and gentlemen, that can be a serious problem.
John C. Morley: (16:10)
Alright, let me move on to our next problem. So the question I have right now, as we're talking a lot about this, and you're probably saying to me, is, what could be more important than that? Well, will President Biden's plan make a difference in cybersecurity?
I don't know. You know, the White House has issued numerous cybersecurity strategies throughout the last decade. And the strategies all point to, and I quote, a rebalancing of the responsibilities to defend cyberspace. Close quote. People are shifting their responsibilities; they're not being accountable. And as we single out China, as the quote, broadest and most active and most persistent threat to both government and private sector networks. Close quote. We got to think about what's going on. And President Joe Biden wants to outline the goals rather than immediately implement rules. I get that he wants to outline the goals, but I think it's important that we don't spend a long time on that. We need to fast-track this. If they pass laws and regulations, it could expand cybersecurity requirements for companies that run digital infrastructures that the White House team's critical. We're talking about your guys like Amazon, your Facebook, Meta, your Google, that kind of people. And the strategy asks government agencies to encourage compliance with tax breaks for other incentives. So the strategy calls out ransomware as a pressing threat. We all know it's a pressing threat, right? If you are not protected, ladies and gentlemen, it's not a question of if you're going to get attacked, but when you're going to get attacked, and I want to quote something they said, “companies that make software must have the freedom to innovate, but they must also be held liable when they fail to live up to the duty of care. They owe customers businesses or critical infrastructure providers”. As this document states, for a year, they always said we would do our best. We're going to try. Unfortunately, ladies and gentlemen, your best is not good enough. If your best gets a company to be attacked, that's a problem. Now, the document calls out the growing threat of ransomware schemes as a particular area of focus and campaigns to basically shut down these bad actors who run ransomware bot servers. And it calls this, and I quote, elicit cryptocurrency exchanges. That may help ransomware be profitable following a 2022 order that came around. So where is this going, and what has happened? We've got to get on the ball with this because if we don't, ladies and gentlemen, we'll find that this will grow exponentially. Thus, I don't say we have to not go to sleep at night, but we need to be at least somewhat aware of what's going on. If you know that the temperature is below zero outside, you're cognizant of it, right? You want to make sure that your heat is on, your pipes aren't freezing, you're aware of the things, you don't necessarily go outside, but you're aware if you were oblivious to the fact that that was going on and you went outside, or you noticed your pipes suddenly just broke, that's because you were not proactive. Our biggest problem right now in the government is that we are not being proactive with ransomware. There are a lot of great companies out there that are doing some things. I won't mention them right now, but I have to tell you that to keep up with ransomware, you can't just have a stable piece of software. It has to be cloud-based because if it's not, threats are going to keep emerging. I mean, you know how we went from antivirus and malware strictly being signature-based? Right now, we've learned more about their behaviors and heuristics, and we've built engines to learn patterns, right? We even have something called sandboxing now, where we can put something in that sandbox and see how it behaves. If it behaves badly, we can document that and report it to other systems that control our infrastructure and other infrastructures. So I think that is key. When we actually network our information resources and we share how things affect networks, that is vital. We don't necessarily have to give the name of the company or thing, but just the data, the demographics of how it's happening, that is very, very, very vital. All right? So we'll keep an eye on that; hopefully, his plans will do something. However, I'm not holding my breath on this. I'm sorry, president, I'm just, I'm just not going to hold my head on it. I don't think they've done enough study to come up with a plan that I would trust. That's just my personal opinion from what I've seen in the past.
All right, well, Ford is creating a new division for its partial hands-free driving tech, huh? So Latitude AI is going to focus on automated driving technology, including a level three unsupervised system. Ford actually hired; actually, I should say rehired 500 employees of the shuttered Argo AI to staff this new subsidiary. Now, I think everyone wants to be the first one to the party with the best toy. What I want to tell you, though, is that the one that makes it to the party first will not get all the accolades. It's not going to get all the praise because there are going to be problems with it. It's going to be the second or third company that actually learns what went wrong and reinvents it so they can find something that is going to be cool. Now, it's not something that's going to happen overnight, but so many people are rushing to it. And you know, Argo's AI shut down not too long ago. Ford said, and I quote, it would shift its spending from level four driverless technology to level two and level three driver-assisted products. So it sounds like they're trying to stay away from the virus of the level four because, you know, there's a lot of liabilities. We don't have all the resources yet to do level four driverless technology, but we do have some great resources for better lane-keeping assistance and products like that. And I want to make another quote that they said, quoting, we're optimistic about a future for Level four ADAD, but profitable fully autonomous vehicles at scale are a long way off. And we won't necessarily have to create that technology ourselves, quote unquote Ford CEO Jim Farley had said. And so they get it. They know that they don't want to be the ones creating yet. They want somebody else to go through that whole brink. Ford isn't the only automaker to bet big on driver-assisted technology. Mercedes-Benz and Volvo are investing quite a heavy penny in unsupervised highway driving features, including using long-range LIDAR laser sensors to enhance the vehicle's object detection abilities. And General Motors has said that its ultra-cruise system will work in 95% of driving scenarios, whereas yet to announce any LIDAR-equipped vehicles of its own. But no doubt, the Latitude AI will be involved in any future announcement. Now, what I have to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, is that you know, on my vehicle, I have linking assist, I have the radar, the smart radar where, you know, you put it on, and it'll actually keep that safe driving distance so it will automatically apply the brake and it will accelerate to maintain that speed appropriately. However, when you use this technology or rely on it when the weather's bad, the car will drop out. And if let's say, the weather's bad, you try to engage, it'll give you an error, or it won't do anything. So I think that's good, but we're going to find out that the technology will get better, it will get more reliable, and when it gets more reliable, we can depend on it. And then maybe someday we can move toward the vehicles like we were talking about. Ford is saying they're a long way off. But obviously, the level four technology, and I think it's going to be something cool, but it's going to be more of a conglomeration, okay? Without getting into this can not be worse, but, you know, the world wide web actually didn't start in just one place, okay? It didn't start in just one place.
I think what many people don't realize is the W3C, an international community that develops open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the web. That's www.w3c.org. They are the ones, ladies and gentlemen, that have worked in things like the automotive and transportation, entertainment, TV and broadcasting, publishing web payments, web of data, web and telecommunications, and the web of things. You've heard it called internet things, what they call, the web of things. Okay? Same thing. They've worked on a code of ethics and professional conduct. They've worked on community groups. And so they've actually helped embrace many developers with APIs to the W3C standards, validations, they've made cheat sheets. They've done more with open-source software, web platform tests and W3CX training. So I think what a lot of people don't understand is that when we have open source, it is still secure as long as the public and private is kept appropriately, people say to me, John, well it's open source, so I don't want to have that. Don't fret because it's open source. Some of the best open-source stuff is more secure than some of the closing stuff because there are still parts that stay secure. So that's something I definitely want to share with you. So, Ford and other car makers, we're going to keep an eye on you and see where we're going with technology. We already know that more features are becoming required on cars as a standard. They're not something that you pay for; you have to pay extra for them. That's pretty key.
John C. Morley: (27:37)
All right, we've been talking about this next culprit for a long time, ladies and gentlemen. And yes, it's a dish. Dish says it's finally making progress with its outage. But my question, ladies and gentlemen, is this just seems so off the wall, okay that this could happen. And when I go to their website, which I just did right now, it says, thank you for your patience.
They update a little more. It has a nice little red color now, and they made a nice little banner. And then, for common issues, they take and click on customer support. And then you can go to their frequently asked questions, their knowledge base. You can click on something, and you know, basically, look at the question, and hopefully, you can go from there. As I said, will I be charged any late fees for not being able to make a payment on time? When our systems are back up, we will review accounts for late fees that occurred while customers were unable to make payments, and those late fees will be removed. Okay, they got another question on there. I'm trying to make a payment on my service fee shut off in the meantime, and it sounds like the same thing. We're currently experiencing issues with processing payments and updating some customers' accounts. If you are affected, you will not lose your service while we resolve this issue. Thanks for being a valued dish customer. Okay, people are calling me about upgrading my equipment. Is this a hoax? For your protection, Dish Network will never call or email you asking for your personal financial or Dish account-related information. This includes your account number, receiver number, social security number, bank information, credit card or debit card information, and dish pin. Please do not give out this information. Spend a few days in us till down. Due to system issues, some users may experience difficulty signing into their accounts and accessing customer support. We appreciate your patience as we work to restore our customer care systems as soon as possible. Trying to make changes to my other service, cancel programming changes, pause others and can't system issues impacting some of our customer service operations. The same basically nonsense all over again. The technician never showed up, and nobody called me. We're sorry for the inconvenience. An internal system issue has impacted some of our customer service operations; who can help you. As soon as our systems are back up. Cannot access my www.dish.com dish anywhere. HBO Max and other streaming services. We apologize for the inconvenience. Our teams are working hard to restore systems as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience. I want to restore or reactivate my service. Again. You're going to get that same we apologize for the message, and I want to order a pay-per-view movie with a certificate. They apologize. So you're probably saying, you know, this is nuts. They have more troubleshooting guides like signal loss errors. You click on that, and it directs you to a YouTube video. Connect your receiver to the internet. There's a video on that too. Missing channels, of course. You go to another page that literally just has one set of instructions. Unplug the power cord of your Dish, which was here for 10 seconds, then plug it back in. The reset process may take up to five minutes to complete. That's their response. If you are missing channels, a frozen video they have two steps. Confirm the source of the issue on your Dish. Remote press and release the SAT button, obviously satellite, followed by the guide button. If you're able to see the guide, follow the troubleshooting steps or black screen with a guide. If you don't see the channel guide, press the channel up for down buttons on the front panel of your receiver. If a channel changes, well, try troubleshooting your remote. If a channel did not change, continue to the following steps. Restart your receiver IP while your receivers unplug the power cord of your Dish for 10 seconds, then plug it back in. The reset process may take up to five minutes to complete. If you have a hopper or a Joey receiver, be sure to reset the hopper before the Joey. Unplug the power cord of your dish receiver for 10 seconds, then plug it back in. The reset process may take up to five minutes to complete. Okay, program your Dish remote to your receiver. A video directs you to YouTube's black screen with a guide. Here are a few steps. Put your receiver on standby mode. Press the power button on the front of your receiver, wait 10 seconds, then power the button again to turn it back on. Restart your receiver. The IP receivers. Unplug the power cord of your dish receiver for 10 seconds, then plug it back in. The reset process may take up to five minutes to complete. Hopper joint receivers. Be sure to reset the hopper before Joey. Unplug the power cord of your dish receiver for 10 seconds, then plug it back in. The reset process may take up to five minutes to complete. It's like deja vu. We just read the same thing in the other spot, right? That's absolutely crazy. No channel guide information. Oh, guess what? They're going to tell you to restart over again. But then, after you restart the VIP receivers on your Dish remote, press the guide button, use the right arrow button, scroll to the far right and keep pressing the right arrow button until it pops up. 318 displays one display select yes to begin the download. The download may take several minutes to complete. If you have a hopper joy receiver on your Dish remote, press the red color button or the options button to view the TV activity screen. If you have no tuners show available, you'll need to make a tuner available for a tuner. Currently recording, select the tuner, and you stop recording for a tuner. Currently watching power off the receiver in a location listed. Once the tuner is available, the guide will download automatically. The download may take several minutes to complete the set of a replacement TV, and they direct you over to a YouTube video. So for additional assistance, please select the “request more information” option below. You click on that screen, it says your email address, and it says, are you looking for new dish services? I'm looking for a new dish service or a current customer of Dish. Now at least, they've added some more functionality to their site, but still not as much as I would expect. And if you go to call Dish by phone. Let's call Dish. Let's see what happens if we call Dish by phone. All right, so their phone number is +1 800-333-3474. Put on speaker here.
Dish Auto-reply : (34:43)
Thank you for calling. We're currently experiencing an extremely high hold time, and your wait time may be longer. Our agents can assist you with name-ordering Pay Preview.
John C. Morley: (34:59)
Okay, so they've changed the message. They say now that they're experiencing a long hold time, and you can wait in line before you get a message saying, basically, there was no way they could help you because there was an outage. So DISH Network finally acknowledged, okay, that there was a huge attack after days of being despondent and not answering questions. DISH Network was suffering from a widespread outage that effectively prevented a large chunk of the company's employees from being able to work for more than four days. Dish tried to downplay the scope of the problem in press reports stating that they'd experienced an ambiguous systems issue five days in, and it was finally revealed that the company had been hacked and subjected to a ransomware attack. And yes, ladies and gentlemen, subscriber data had been compromised, but customers didn't find this album Dish. They only learned about it when it was leaked from other internal communications. Dish has told its employees. And I quote, investigating a cybersecurity incident. Close quote. And that's it. Aware that certain data was extracted close from its IT systems. As a result of this incident, according to an internal email sent by C E O Eric Carlson and that was obtained by the Verge. This comes on the fifth day of an internal outage that's taken down some of the company's internal networks, customer support systems and websites such as Boost infinite.com and dish.com. If I go to boost infinite.com, I'm just curious, do I get the same message? I get a little different message there. I get. Thank you for your patience. We're experiencing a system issue that our teams are working hard to resolve. Your mobile service should not be interrupted during this time. For more information regarding our system issues, please click here. You click here, and while they don't even give you much, they just tell you that on February 23rd, we experienced a cybersecurity incident that affected some of our internal communications customer call centers and internet sites. We immediately activated our incident response, and business continuity plans to contain, assess, and remediate the situation. We retained the services of cybersecurity experts and outside advisors to assist in the evaluation of the situation, and we notified appropriate law enforcement authorities on February 27th. We became aware that certain data was extracted from our IT systems as part of this incident. Its possible investigation will reveal that the data extracted includes personal information, the forensic invention begins the forensic investigation and assessment of the impact of this incident is ongoing. Of course, you do that. The security of our customer's data is important to us, and if we learn that the information was compromised, we'll take the appropriate steps and let any impacted customers know. As a result of this incident, many of our customers are having trouble reaching our customer service desk. We're making daily progress on the customer service front, but it will take a little time before things are fully restored. Boost Infinite mobile service continues to operate and is up and running. There's a link to a legal page privacy page. There's a link to a California page that does not sell. My information page is a link to that. And, if you want to opt out of Boost Infinites systems, you can do that. So they have that up there, which is nice. Then we have a do Not contact form I'm, and they tell you how to let them know that you don't want to be contacted. But the funny part on the top says if you click on any of these buttons here, okay, you can click on some things. But if you click on the get started button, which is what I would assume to click on, or the full do not contact policy, you can click on that. But if I click on Get Started due to a system issue, some users may experience difficulty accessing their Boost Mobile account, paying the bill or reaching customer care. Wireless phone service is not affected by this issue. Our teams are working hard to restore the system as soon as possible. If payment cannot be processed, your wireless service will not be suspended during this period due to non-payment. Gee, thanks. Thank you for your patience. That's a mess. So I think the reason why that site has some more details on it might be because it's in California or might be because it has to do with wireless, and they're required to put some of the information. So employees have been completely locked out of the systems. They see blank screen icons during the ransomware attacks, and they claim that it's so bad at Dish that their primary website is a placeholder page. But at least they were able to get around confirming things in this ambiguous way. You might have recalled that Dish Network was part of the dilapidated Trump error plan to justify the T-mobile sprint merger by encouraging Dish to build its own 5G. Well, that plan isn't going well either in the semi-T-Mobile’s inability to secure its network. You have to wonder how much merger logistics distracted this company. Maybe they should just focus on actually providing services and not try to shirk the responsibilities. I don't know. In the last line I quote, you have to wonder how much merger logistics distracted the company from competent revisions to its privacy and security standards. Close quote. It's not possible to make competent revisions to privacy and security standards when competence is not their skillset, or they don't have any to revise. Yeah. How do you revise a plan when you don't even have a benchmark to work from? Here's another quote I'd like to read from basically a customer. I won't mention their name, or quote, perhaps it's just me, but I'm not wondering at all. Nothing indicates that privacy and security were in Dish Networks' wheelhouse before the merger. I'm going to speculate that the merger did nothing to improve their lack of competency. I'm not imagining the following conversation still taking place under the quote. Hey. Boss Casey is incredible at working out security issues. Not to mention having an in-depth understanding of privacy. Let's put them on the merger. Close quote. I want to bring up something here about this company. So I have a friend of mine that was applying to work for this company, and they put him through so many Rigas. He told me he got there in the morning at eight and was going through interviews for about four or five hours. And these weren't even valid interviews. It was like they kept moving from one step to the other. He said it was really just a futile waste of his time. I want to say that companies need to be competent. And I'm not just talking about this company. I'm talking about all companies. Cuz a lot of these wireless companies and the one that we know in the US that got brought out by a French company, they're really not good when it comes to customer service. If I have one more person when I pick up the phone and they say, I'll be happy to help you with that one. What one? I wasn't talking about one. Yeah, we'll work, work on that one. What are you even talking about? I don't know, ladies and gentlemen. So it doesn't surprise me what happened there. I just hope that they get everything back up soon. And if you are a Dish customer, I would tell you right now to change your credit cards and Ensure your information is confidential. Check your credit reports. You can go through the, you know, free credit report.com. Get your three credit reports, and if anything is wrong, make sure you submit a dispute to fix it.
John C. Morley: (43:38)
All right, I want to share one more little story with you tonight. How many of you out there have heard of RingRing, RingRing, RingRing, RingRing? I'm not talking about the company ring that does phones. I'm talking about how many of the Ring'sRing's features will no longer be free. Yes, I'm talking about ring alarms and ring doorbells. So Ring is now requiring a subscription for more camera and alarm features. This started, I guess, based on some conversation on March 29th. Okay, obviously, in 2023, all new users of the Ring alarm security system will have to pay for basic features such as arming and disarming the system and using Alexa voice control ring cameras are also losing free features for existing customers too. I think that's terrible. So another company will charge US customers more money for using existing features as a subscription-based Smart Home becomes the norm. I think that is just a crime. That's a legalized crime. Amazon owns RingRing, and it's making several free features. Part of its pay-a-subscription program starts March 29th, as I mentioned. As of the date, if you have a Ring video doorbell camera, you will no longer have access to Home and Away modes in the app without a paid subscription starting at $3.99 a month or $39.99 a year. Modes is a simple way to tell all your cameras to stop detecting motion when you're home and start when you leave. That's a very valuable feature, and they're going to charge for it. So all new users of the Ring Alarm system on or after March 29th will have to pay for a Ring Protect plan to arm and disarm the systems from the app. You can use the Modes feature, receive notifications and control it with their Alexa voice system. Linking your Ring Doorbell and cameras to your alarm system will also now cost you some money. Existing Ring Alarm customers will not lose access to any of these features.
John C. Morley: (45:49)
However, as one user on a blog pointed out, there are no guarantees. The Ring will continue to allow Legacy users to have features they paid for. They are now quote, based on this type of behavior; I assume they will be boiling us frogs at some point. This is the misdirection stage close quote Hero. So I think this comes down to the fact that it's a problem. And if you're saying to me, Hey, John, you know, simply Safe, which was another company out there that you know, do fees for alarms used to charge for access to its app but introduced a free tier that provides three basic features like due to pressure from competitors like RingRing. They don't charge for self-mode ring integration with Alexa but for access to their own home automation system. So they get access to your home through the Ring app and Alexa to control your alarm. New users must now sign up for the basic RingRing Protect plan at $3.99 a month or $39.99 a year. You only need to pay $20 a month or $200 a year for the Pro Plan. If you want to add professional monitoring to your system or any other features they offer, you still only cost $10 a month, but RingRing raised all of its planned prices last year. So looks like people are either going to be paying these prices or they're going to be ditching the RingRing, no pun intended.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, we've got many great episodes coming this year. I am so happy to be back with you guys and another series again, and this is year two. We're on episode number nine.
John C. Morley: (47:40)
Hey, listen, if you would like to be a guest on the J Moore Tech Talk show, I remember it's not a sales show. We look for people that are going to provide value real easy to do. Go to www.jmor.com, click the reach out button, and apply to become a guest on the show. We'll be so grateful to have you on the show if you're a match because we love connecting with other great people. I love to learn from people I know who love to learn from me. I love to get this information out to our wonderful audience. We're on many different platforms. And so you can check us out. Also, check out some of my other great content at www.believemeachieve.com, including John's brand new release now on apple, iTunes, Spotify, and many other you-know podcast distributors. You could check that out. It is called IFYL (Inspirations for Your Life). And you can listen to all the great information while you're in your car, working out, or maybe just making yourself some dinner. Have yourself a great rest of your night. And remember, ladies and gentlemen, technology itself is not good or bad. It's how we as people choose to use it. Have yourself a wonderful rest of your weekend. And I am going to see you guys for series 10 next week. Hey, how about that 10 on 10? We got to do some special that day. It’s series 2, episode 10 on the 10. I would say when a number happens twice; it is something good. That’s a good sign. Have yourself a great rest of your weekend. Hope you enjoyed this. And remember to be smart while using technology. Take Care.