Lowell Michigan Data Center Debate Hits a Snag (Tech Tuesday)

in our Tech Talk Tuesday. Our good friend, Trent, Can I be affordable eye store, Lake Michigan Drive, and Standale joining us with the latest on this story. Trent, welcome, and we appreciate you taking the time to hang out with us every Tech Talk Tuesday and break down the latest on these. So let's do this. This is the data center issue. Here's the update for you in case people wanted to see. This is the city of Lull. And good morning. Welcome in to you, my friend. Good morning, Justin. You've had some tech issues this morning. We're powering through them. We're going to get through them. Let me see. We've had some tech issues this morning. And it's probably because I've had to switch setups and move cameras around to do these other, to do some of these other broadcast, which had been kind of fun to do. But at the same time, somebody said, we miss your beautiful face. They want to see me. I guess they want to make sure it's not AI. It's kind of like an old radio throwback. Here's the city of Lull, suspending utility negotiations for the data center. So they've kind of called this off in Lull. And mostly this surrounds the conversation of water. And I think some other utility issues, sewer. They write, the city of Lowell has announced that it's suspending its participation in utility negotiations that would facilitate the development of that data center. I think it's Microsoft who wants to put that in. Data Center has been proposed for the Covenant Business Park by the I-96 interchange in Lowell in the township there. Few details have been released about the data center. The company behind the proposal has not been named. Again, I think it was Microsoft, but maybe we don't have all of that available to us right now. But that's just part of this conversation, Trent. This is a big one. People have been watching this, and they want to, you know, they want to, they really want to be involved in these conversations. And they ought to be. This is maybe another win for those folks who are sort of saying if they're not anti-dedistance. Slow this down. Let's at least make sure we know what we're getting into. That's right, Justin. Hopefully we'll see more of this, at least this healthy pause, just to stop and think because there's a proposed data center. We have no idea of the water, the sewer, the infrastructure. And then think about the location, Justin, 96 corridor. It looks like 96 and I96 junction over there. I don't know, Jess, I drive through there once in a while. I don't know where you would put a massive data center over there. Traffic is already crazy over there. There's a lot of businesses. There's a lot of houses. There's obviously the highways there. What is the impact of the data center on that? So yes, it's a good healthy pause. People need to stop and think. And Justin, we see this reoccurring theme. They don't want to say even the company's name. Why would it matter what the company's name is unless there's something big and crazy to hide? What would that hurt? Justin, think.

about if either one of us went into our city hall or went to an investor for our business and said, well, we got this big idea, but we're not going to tell who we're going to be working with for the next 50 years in a partnership. We don't want to tell you that. you know, here's the other parameters of the deal. Just that's really important. Who are we working with here? What is their track record? What are their other projects? Who's involved? And that's a big red flag. I'm glad they're putting a pause on this. This, just to kind of put another little note on this, there's actually just a lot of farmland out here. In fact, if it's Alden Nash, if you've ever been there at the Lull exit, there's a little. There's a gas station there, pretty decent size. There's a park and ride, lots of farmland, and then there's Heidi's Farm Stand, which we love going to. This is just down the road from us. If you drive all the way to Countdown Cascade Road, you'll hit Olden Nash. And we quite often, quite frequently go to Heidi's, and we'll get donuts, or you'll get, you know, flowers or, you know, a wreath for Christmas or something like that or all kinds of fresh produce. So this area I'm pretty familiar with, and I'll say, I've never seen anything like it. In Loll, Cedar Springs, you'll see a lot of them, too, in these areas. But these data centers are proposed, lots of opposition to it, and the signs that go up. No data center, no data with the, you know, cross through it or whatever. It really is interesting to me because this is one of those subjects that is going to continue to be front and center, not only I think in this election, but on and to the future. Trent can be affordable eye store, Lake Michigan Drive in Standdale and Grand River Tech, AffordableEastore.com, Grand River Tech.com. We're going to be getting in some hacking news. So Trent is an IT one-stop shop. where he can take care of your business, he can take care of your organization, your church, your school, and you may think, I just have a little coffee shop. Everyone needs to be protected. In fact, Trent makes a point, it's kind of a matter of national security. We all ought to be on board with this. This is sort of a patriotic thing that we all ought to be making sure we're taking the charge in. Now, We just had last week another big story that came around. And this one, folks, if you don't think this stuff affects you, it affects each and every one of this. Now, I've seen some back and forth on who actually did this and what happened. But the reports are in Minnesota, more than 30 water systems were targeted in a cyber attack. If you think you can go without water. You got another thing coming. We all need it. A water system attack. What happened with this hack here, Trent? So basically the water systems that we have all across our country. And Justin, this was not just Minnesota. This was in seven states, including Michigan. And again, every time you hear a hacking story, a cyber security, a cyber threat story, remember, you're hearing what's being reported, what is known to be hacked. Justin, there is news coming out.

of hacks that are have been open a vulnerability in a server system or a network that has been unknown and exploited for over 20 years in different cases so whenever you see oh 30 water systems seven states that's what they know unknown of what they don't know so what happened is is the bad guys hacked into some smaller municipality water systems water treatment plants they have sensors they have Wi-Fi they have internet connected devices to manage the flow of the water the pump controls valves regulation of chemicals even treatment chemicals and some some states obviously they have fluoride and different sanitation chemicals and they basically shut it down and so in these places they shut the water system down. And the cities did this once they realized they were attacked. They turned things over to manual control, tried to restore things, which they were able to do. fairly quickly. Obviously the fear is, and this has happened before in different municipalities, if you take certain chemicals for the sanitation of the water, you crank those up to maximum, those can be lethal. They can be very dangerous to people. And I know there's supposed to be fail safes and downline and your better water treatment systems do have a lot of fail saves for this exact scenario, but there's plenty that don't. And who's to say those fail safes? don't get caught so they could be chemically injecting the water with things that are dangerous for you that you don't know about quickly. Maybe they'll find out eventually, sadly. Or they just straight up turn the water off. And this is happening all over the country. Like I said, in this specific known case, seven states, we've had numerous stories of this before. And it's all because our technology infrastructure is not protected and set up properly to prevent this. This is the issue, folks. It's one thing when there's a hack and it takes down your Netflix or Facebook or something like that. That's no fun. But you need a little break anyway. So get out and maybe enjoy it a little time disconnected. But when you're talking about major infrastructure like this, it's a whole... different world, Trent, what do you recommend? Because I know people are going to be watching this thinking, okay, how do I make sure I stay connected, I stay protected? What do people do to make sure that they are on the front lines of this fight with their companies, their organizations, their schools, whatever it might be? So, Justin, the biggest issue we have is with the country, with individuals, is we all need a reset on what these things are. If you or I or some bad guy went over physically to this facility and disabled the pumps, messed with the treatment things to harm people,

you could be, you could go before, you'd be arrested, you'd go before a court, and there's no jury in this country that wouldn't throw you in jail for life or capital punishment for attempting to poison thousands or millions of people on municipal water supply, intentionally trying to do that. When we have cyber attacks, we kind of just roll it off like, hey, this happened, it's some bad guy. No, we need to take it just as seriously. We are under attack by foreign countries, and we need to treat it as such. If somebody broke into our house, or is trying to break into our house like that, we would treat it differently. So everybody needs to take this much more seriously for what it is. And they need to do what they can to protect themselves. On a business level, on a personal level, there's a lot you can do to protect yourself from these hacks. There's a reason it was 30 locations across seven states and not 3,000 over 50 states, right? There's people that have defenses in place that are working. There's people that don't. And so we need to take this seriously and we need to protect ourselves. And if we don't, we're letting the enemy win. They're attacking us. They're taking over infrastructure. They're learning how to do this. They're profiting off this. Who knows so many of those people got a ransom out of this? I hope not. We need to do the right thing and protect ourselves. There's a lot you can do as an individual or business with your network, your security, your firewall, software updates that can greatly help reduce or eliminate these type of threats. And again, Trent's the guy to go to. He'll walk you through it. Honestly, in fact, you can even calculate your price. If you even know what you need, you could go in there and do it. A lot of times you even call someplace, you're like, oh, gosh, what am I getting into? You know, are they going to, this can be an arm and a leg for this? I get my firstborn because I have no idea what I'm doing that with Trent. He knows. As a business owner himself, small business owner, that you want those answers up front and you want to know what to expect. And he walk you through it. And with an honest approach to all of this, like he does everything else. All right. Great question from Jason in the chat. Trent, why would a water company a utility need to be connected to the internet? So the answer to that question is very quick and easy. Convenience. When you have hundreds of valves, pipes, chemical levels, it's just a convenience to have these things connected because you can monitor them. You can adjust flow. You can, yeah, you can manage that system remotely. It's a convenience thing. It's also a safety thing. So if you have digital monitoring in general, that's way safer than having to wait. for somebody to go check those things manually once a day like the olden days so there's a lot of safety things but obviously that comes at a massive increased responsibility and i get you know the person has asked this question their point is hey is the convenience worth the risk. And I would say if you have a properly secured system that's set up correctly for something that can be a huge safety factor, it can be helpful. And you can have all those safety features without an internet connection on local networks. So yes, a lot can be done to make things better and retain that convenience and safety factor.

All right, I got to get into some interesting, these are some interesting pieces. Is your vacuum spying on you? Look, I'm just going to say this. To everything that you have that connects to the internet, every bit of it, yes, it's all spying on every one of us. At least that's what I think. Could be wrong. But I saw this the other day. And I had no idea this was a thing. But this is a story. I think it's chicks on the right is who brought this up online. Let me see if I can pull this up for you so you can see it. But. They've banned some, you know, those Roomba, the, you know, the robot vacuums. They've banned some of these in the country. And it's for an interesting... For banning future Roombas and any other advanced robot vacuums from being sold. in the United States. What's the rationale? So the FCC has banned new foreign-produced advanced robotic devices like Roomba's because of the sensors, the navigation, the wireless connectivity, and all of these cybersecurity vulnerabilities, particularly because of the Chinese supply chain. I had no idea. I had no clue. China. You couldn't buy these vacubs anymore. There's more to it, though, by the way. It's not just the fact that they're hackable. So if you have one right now, it's fine. And your current one is fine. New ones are going to require commitments to U.S. manufacturing for waivers, maybe shifting production, and just getting out of from under the boot of China when it comes to these devices. The other thing that I don't know if they got into in this, but those things make a map of your house. Like, there's lots of information and data that they give, and every device we have does. It's always sending this stuff. You think, well, I'm my camera on or don't have to that. There's all kinds of stuff that's getting sucked up into the internet and beyond, Trent. And I guess that's why part of this is so concerning with all the internet of things we have in our homes. That's right, Justin, like you said earlier, anything that connects to the internet, that's a fairly, inexpensive, you know, home device, a baby monitor, a coffee maker that has, you know, Wi-Fi, your robot vacuum, it's all the sensors. Those things can be expensive. But they're still mass-produced devices, and they rely on that data to... essentially make money, Justin, to put some of the money together for their business model. And that's terrible. It's wrong. It's terrible. This information is going back to China in most cases. And if it's not going back to China, it's being sold in the open markets. What really surprised me, Justin, how you know that we have to have a big pause, maybe not trust big tech.

is when all of the environmental concerns that big tech historically has been sort of lockstep with, all of a sudden collecting that data, which has a massive environmental impact on data centers and sensors and electricity and power, nobody will say, hey, if we didn't do that, what's the CO2 emissions on harvesting that data? I don't see any stats on that anywhere. Where did Greta go? How dare you? Where did she go? Where did she was all upset? No, that's a very good point. Now they're not talking about that at all anymore. What else is spying on you? Well, your car. It turns out your car. Your car's probably spying on you too. And in the future, Trent, you sent this over today. And I thought, oh, this is a good one. They're working on, like, reporting you to the cops. This is crazy. Your car's ratting you out. So Justin, this is a patent that Ford filed with the government that basically has a nice little, almost hand-drawn sketchy flowchart that says, here's how this is going to work. Your vehicle has cameras, speed sensors, internet connection, a computer and everything built in. And when it spots a speeder, it's going to go down a flow chart of documenting the vehicle's description. It's going to get the license plate. It's going to get a speed that's based off its sensors. speeding, it's going to send it into a database, and it's going to tell the cops so that they can go chase you. They even have, is it going to pursue you? The cops are going to pursue you or not. When this went viral on the internet, Justin, the Ford CEO or whoever from their representative said, no, no, no, no, this is a mistake. This is just simply for police only. But if you read the diagram, there is nothing in there that says this is for police only because it says in the diagram, they will contact. Police. If you are the police, you don't need to contact them. So I suspect this is the new flock camera on wheels equivalent. That's a whole lot more powerful. Sean says, why would they want to spy on us? What's the purpose? Control. Every single bit of it, they just want a little bit more control over everything you do. The little more information gives them that ability to do it. And it's since the end of time. Why wouldn't anybody want to control anyone else? Since the end of time, it's been one of the, or at the beginning of the time, it's been one of those crazy things that has just been a problem. Hey, this is an issue causing problems in tech. But it's not really high-tech. It's actually weather-related. Now, they'll tell you global warming, climate change. But there's actually something else going on. Ships can't move. Power plant shut down as a drought is sapping Europe's rivers. It's really interesting to look at some of the footage coming out of the Wall Street Journal report on this. Again, it's not like a hack, but it is something that's causing problems right now, Trent. Yeah, Justin, this is sad because you have 100, 120 years, maybe 150 years worth of weather data. And if you look back in history, Jess, we've been around for 6,000 years as far as I believe.

We hear stories of people, operator air every now and then walking in, and he can just help you with one little click. And maybe it's something deeper that they got to dive into. Trent, I heard my aunt was, or Lizzie's aunt was asking. Last week when we were out at the Grand Haven at the Coast Guard Festival, she's got this old Mac, I don't remember what she was trying to give it away to us. And we just, we don't really, we don't do that. We don't need us something to sit at the desk anymore. But I say, you know who might want that? is Trent. He's building this museum right now, which is kind of neat to see inside the store. If you really want to see, like, all the old school Apple stuff, you can walk in and see that. And I told her, you gotta call him. Maybe he'll take it. I don't even know if she wants any money for it. I think she's trying to get rid of it and bring it someplace where they'd appreciate it. So I told her about that, and she just kind of had a smile on her face. She said, a museum. I said, you've got to see some of the stuff Trent has. It really is interesting. It takes me back all the way to like some of the beginning. Like I remember using some of these in school. They were the coolest computers in school. I remember like the Macs were the coolest. But you have a whole thing set up in your store right now, don't you? That's right, Justin. We got a collection of old Macs before I was even alive. So that day's below, I had to become familiar with them because I had never used in my life. And then we have the stuff that I used as a kid that people can just come check out and see. And it's amazing where Apple has gone. where computers have gone in general. So yeah, come check it out, Justin. If you have old tech sitting around, definitely bring it in. We'll recycle it for free. We'll make sure that we get your data erased. It's really important that you don't take an old computer and sit it on a shelf. Number one, you forget what's on it. And if you need data off it or not, number two, if it gets lost or stolen or somebody takes that, a lot of old data can be on there and your social security number is pretty timeless. Doesn't really go out of date. And then the next thing is, is anything with a lithium battery, we see a lot of people take old phones, tablets, and laptops that have lithium batteries, they sit them on a shelf for five or ten years, and then they go plug them back in someday to charge them up to say, hey, does this thing still work? What's on this? That is the most dangerous thing you can do when you have a lithium battery that's been sitting dormant. for five or 10 years or even two or three years and you plug it in and charge it to 100%. That's when the risk of explosion and cell expansion is the highest. So definitely don't let those things sit. It doesn't do any good sitting on a shelf. Get it turned in. We'll recycle it. We'll give you money for it if there's value or we'll donate it if it can still be used by somebody else. You know, it's something I didn't even thought about, but you're right.

We see fire started every day because of these batteries. And you have them like in every device in your house now. I mean, and especially you start talking about how they're aging and how old they are and whatnot. It's something to keep in mind. Grand River Tech, Grand River Tech.com where you can get all the help with your cybersecurity needs as well. Stay connected and stay protected. If folks want to reach out, tell them I sent you and Trent will take care of you. Always a pleasure, my friend.