this person on the other end of your chat may not be a person at all. from airlines to banks, bots take over. cyber security experts keep their eye on threats to democracy as the hours wind down to election day. and don't worry, mom, silicon valley engineers say it's a safer go cart. the toy every kid will want. we'll talk to the brains behind it. our reporters, the new york observer and michael litky, this

week on "press here." >> good morning, i'm, i'm scott mcgrew. we can count the hours until election day. donald trump predicts the election will be rigged despite assurances from every credible expert it will not be of the we'll take their word for it. the election will not be rigged but could it be hacked? the u.s. has formally accused of russians of trying to influence the election. could the kremlin go so far as to change the results or is that a tom clancy level fantasy? we have seen candidates e-mail attacked and parts of the internet went dark late last month. the director of security and security strategy at cyber security company anomaly, joined by mike litge and rich of observer.com and smart news. i have a couple of little housekeeping items to get taken care of before we start. looking over your linkedin, at

one point you were with the republican party working in texas and somebody can look that up, wait a minute, maybe you have ever right to have done something with the republican party in texas. i want to get that out there, the one important thing. the second one and feel free not to speak to this, is one of your investors at anomaly in q tell, which is the cia, isn't it? >> not going to comment on that. those are the rumors. >> very good. >> that said, i do -- have done my due diligence, find you as a neutral comment ator on security but wanted people to understand those two things. could the russians hack our election? is it physically possible? >> it's possible but it's probably not as simple as people may make it out to be. there's a lot of protocols around the election process that

exist to try to prevent fraud as it exists and these protocols end up having the effect of making it harder to hack. >> one of the things that makes it harder, the fact we have so many different ways of electing people. they use this computer, that's got to frustrate any hacker. >> it would be easier if there was a central voting authority in the united states and everybody used the same system and everything was one central database but that's not the case. this is a decentralized process. >> our messed our electoral system is an sasset. >> actually protects us. >> that's good to know. i was curious about the recent attack on the corporation that took down twitter and number of huge sites. particularly the suggestion that there were -- that the attackers were basically internet of things devices. is my drop cam or tivo, are they double acts? do i have to be suspicious?

>> that is absolutely the case. may not necessarily be tivo or alexa, but when you're harnessing the power of a bot net to do this damage, you're basically taking devices from all over the world, the more the better and generating traffic to try to take something out or overwhelm dine as it was in this case. so the more these things that you can get that can be part of this bot net, more powerful -- >> why would anybody make that attack at that time? i could see doing it as some sensitive moment where it was important. but it just seems random. >> that's a good question. in this particular -- >> blackmail or revenge or something like that? >> it could have been. it could have been just flexing muscle as well. this bot net that harnesses the internet of things, you know, all of these web cams and things

that are connected to the internet, taking advantage of the fact that people install these and they wekt to the router and don't change the password. this bot net takes advantage of that and basically logs in and installs software and allows it to communicate to the net. >> i'm interested then, it seems like every other day we're hearing about some sort of breach somewhere. how concerned should people be about all of the information they have and these data centers and all of these other attack points coming? it's kind of scary to think about. >> it is something to be concerned with. personally, i try to limit what's out there because i understand anything i put on, linkedin, for instance, it's just as easily going to end up in the hands of whoever, whether i set it as private or not. this -- it becomes a bigger challenge as you have things like health and medical records and things making their way to online pe pos tris and things like that.

>> i'm also interested in your attack at ha yahoo! with 500 million accounts were hacked into. what your thoughts were, should it take two years for yahoo! to uncover that? do you think it was a state sponsored agent as yahoo! kind of frames it? >> it's hard to say. atrib bugs is really hard. there's sometimes little fingerprints that make it look like it might be this or that or something is in a different language or something like that. with that in itself isn't necessarily an indicator that for sure it was sponsored -- >> security experts like you say this was state sponsored whatever it happens to be or the fbi says, these wikileaks attacks were state sponsored. is that what they are looking for? there's some sort of phone trace -- not a phone but ip trace that you can do. you said languages in whatever it is. that's what they are looking for and i guess my follow-up

question would be, if i know that's what they are looking for, it would be just as easy to plant things in. >> absolutely. >> that's what makes it hard. because people that know that that's what they are looking for are just as easily to do exactly like you said. they usually -- in order to really do your best assessment of who the attacker might be, you want to look at everything. it's the infrastructure they use, the techniques they use and specific tools they use. all of this combines into telling a story and analysts are then able to make their best judgment as to who they think it is. >> did it seem conceivable it took two years to even -- it seems their story is -- >> california law says they should have told us a lot sooner, right? >> i think they knew -- >> if they knew. >> they may not have known. >> that's scary. >> the common thread between things like yahoo! and denial of

service attack, in each case you have to ask yourself, did yahoo! take all appropriate steps? do the device manufacturers who make these internet of things devices that were used in this attack, did they take all appropriate steps and if so, how do these things continue to happen? >> that's a valid question. in yahoo!'s case, certainly they should have had things in place to be able to try to detect this, various security programs. they have lots of great engineers there. they should have been able to figure out that something was going on over such a long period of time. but these enemies are stelthy too. >> let me ask you one last question and i ask you to use your imagination, if are a bad guy, what's the worst thing possible that you would say let's do this? what are you most afraid of that is realistic? >> well, the bot net turned into

this massive ddos machine. >> distributed denial of service. >> what just happened weeks ago. i think you know, with us continuing to put more and more of this stuff out there, i think those things could turn into something that could really impact the entire internet. >> travis, director of security strategy, thanks for being with us. >> thank you. >> from the bank of america to the trump campaign, bots are changing the way we communicate? what's a bot and what can it do for you? when we continue.

welcome back to "press here", when you call the airline you talk to a computer which asks where you're going and where you want to fly and you're used to talking to computers by now. what you may not real list they can also chat at you in your own text messages or on facebook, you can text and say i need a flight. it's not a person, it's the same sort of artificial intelligence you experience on the phone as more and more of us communicate by text, the bots will become more and more influential. bank of america, hyatt hotel, cnn use bots you can internet with online.

ben h ben knows a lot of bots. if ben looks familiar, he was a panelist for us when i was a reporter at mashable. thanks for being with us. there are different levels of ai, right? the basic sort of facebook bots, can't ask complicated questions the way i could. >> everyone wants to have wally or those intelligent bots but they are not there yet. you can do things like a facebook bot like schedule meetings but they can't learn from you quite yet. >> you're scripting a lot of this. you're anticipating if he says how are you or some variation of that, i'm able to return some sort of answer? >> yes, absolutely. a bot can do other things leak a mobile app can do, showcase content or help you fill out forms or things like that. >> isn't google kind of changed with the system incorporated in the new mobile app? >> absolutely, it's just not

google but amazon and microsoft. it's going to take a couple of years. what we're trying to do is show that the bots can have real use cases and introduce more intelligence over time. >> are these bots going to get more and more smart and free us up to do other things and give us more free time and learn new things ourselves or make us dumber and lazier? >> hopefully -- >> it could be either/or. the real truth is it could help free our time to focus on other things we want instead of having to make complex decisions. we can offload that to a bot that can frankly access more information faster than we can. >> i'll play devil's advocate, i don't find it more satisfying than dealing with a human being or website. isn't the real magic that we want in the artificial intelligence and aren't we still quite aways away from having the bot be responsive in a

meaningful way when we throw a curveball at it or something? >> right now absolutely. you need to sometimes have a person, like in our product, we have customer service where it will show you to a person when the bot doesn't understand what you're saying. but i think in the long run -- >> which is a lot of the time in my experience. >> there's a lot of clear use cases and a lot of clear faqs and things like that you can do through a bot and save your business time. you can do a lot of that now but the other big thing is majority of consumers would rather text or message with a brand than call or e-mail them. this is helping push forward a better thing for consumers. >> you're one of the early companies doing that for very small -- somebody can go online and on your website create a bot themselves for their small business or what not, correct? >> yep, you can create one in three minutes. >> and it will answer simple questions like what hours are you open, whatever i tell it to answer is how that will work,

right? >> correct, right now. >> what do they ask fifty cent. >> the most hilarious things that i can't say on television, do you need more money? no, i'm good. you can ask him things like where he was born and how -- >> is it obviously nobody thinks they are actually talking to him, there has on an ethical thing here. >> we think the best practice and we tell all of our customers that you say it's a bot. you can't replicate a human conversation with any app. it's not a good thing or ethical -- >> been trying to do that since the touring test, right? >> absolutely. we're not there and that's not the whole point of octane. the whole point of bots right now, we can auto mate the tasks that took hours before and make businesses have more time and save more money. >> there a particular reason you picked messenger as the

platform? is it something special about messenger? >> facebook messenger hit a billion users this year and growing faster and facebook released a lot of tools to make their bots smarter and better and more efficient. it's the first logical place but we'll go from -- >> are you resting on top of facebook's tools making them more accessible or giving a value to that as well? >> facebook, they are the platform. they want you to build bots like you build the apps on top of it. we're the tool set. >> you'll forgive me for saying this, you are the zynga of facebook, games ran -- >> i'm not sure he will forgive you for that. >> you know what, they -- i can live with that. >> let's talk about your funding, phil, a common friend of ours, how did you get funding for this.

you were a reporter at one point. how do you walk in and say i need funding even though i never technically had a startup? >> the answer was we had to talk to them over and over again. first time we pitched he wasn't interested but then we showed him the progress and product. it was showing the product, where he was like, i understand this. he knew there was an opportunity to make bots accessible to everybody but we were the first plasform he saw, this is the one that will gain market share. so that was the main reason but you'll have to ask phil himself. >> i can ask phil. >> how is it going about start ups of trying to run a startup? >> i'm a unique snowflake, i started out as an entrepreneur in college and landed at mashable. en entrepreneurship feels like what i should be doing and always wanted. i get to write. i get to do both. >> ben, i'm a unique snowflake.

thanks for joining us this morning. we wish you luck. the silicon valley executive with the money and know how to build just about anything builds a go cart when "press here" returns.

welcome back. when i was a kid there were two things i could not have, a bb gun, you know why, because i

would shoot my eye out and a go cart. you may have similar rules with your kids but what if somebody built a crash avoiding smart go cart? this is the real thing. the aero smart cart from active motors speed limits are set on a parent's phone and sensors keep the kid from hitting a parked car. it was created by dave bell, a long time silicon valley executive and racing fan as well. you sat around with your founders and funders and said, what can we build that would get us sued. my first shotgun, it just seems like a dangerous product to start out with despite all of the safety features? >> any kid riding a vehicle has hazards associated with it. we wanted to bring the product -- it was fun to drive for the kids but also the parents felt it was going to be safe. we're using technology to do that. if you look at silicon valley impacting every area of our

lives, toys is one area. >> elon musk has gotten grief over calling it autopilot. it has computers that keep it safe, you've extended yourself a little bit, haven't you, as opposed to no, this is terribly dangerous and be very careful? >> there's still the responsibility of the parent that's important. we're trying to aug dg ment the parents responsibility to watch their kid. one of the reason there's a vacuum in the kids market, responsible parent is not going to take a 5-year-old kid and put him in a vehicle that goes 12 miles per hour. we're allowing that to happen with the parent still there supervising from the curbside or driveway but they are still able to stop the cart and control it. >> right from their phone. >> i'm wondering if given your demographic you're aiming for in silicon valley and detroit racing to build a car that drives by itselves.

will they get behind a wheel -- >> going to be people driving themselves, at least for entertainment and enjoying driving cars. myself ks i'm in that category. commuting, i would rather be driven. when i'm not commuting, people enjoy driving. one of the things we're passionate about as well, being a car guy is i like to develop car control skills in kids before they get behind the wheel of the two-ton car. this clearly does -- putting on something like drift rings to go over the real wheels, watching five kids drift around the parking lot is wonderful. >> i'm curious about who you did most user testing with, parents or kids. the parent in me would want those controls and want to be monitoring everything but the kid in me would be going, oh, dad. >> we don't drive the kid around. there is one product we know where literally the kid sits in the cart and --

>> this drives but the parent has the ability to set limits, set the speed limit anywhere up to 12 miles per hour. if necessary they can hit the emergency stop button on thing on things like collision avoidance and they have the ability to set the limits to the extent they want. if the kid is really talented, you can take restrictions off and let them do what they want. >> on a sunday morning level of discussion, how does the collision avoidance work? >> it's the same technology that's in the backup sensors in your car. ultrasonic distance sensor. ours happens to have a longer range and works at the faster speed. with most obstacles that the inexperienced kid might be aiming at, a wall, a garage door, a car, it will stop in most cases before it impacts that open is a cal. longer term, the technology can be applied to bigger vehicles. is that what of what you're thinking of doing? >> absolutely. i'm not going to talk very much about long range plans but our

initial product is one we think can be phenomenally successful. the next steps beyond that are going to be to come out with other smart electric vehicles for the entire family, for older teenagers and even adults, beyond that, you're absolutely right, there's technology we're developing that has many applications going forward. >> there will be one that scott and i can fit into? >> you could fit in it today. it wouldn't be pretty but -- >> the motor would be like -- >> what is the involvement in the company, he started it but not that involved, or does he take pretty involved? >> we've been friends almost 25 years when he first came to the valley. i retired from the semiconductor industry 20 years ago an he knew i was looking for something fun to engage in again. he called me up more than two years ago, i've got something i want to do. he said, my older son and i are going go carting, but the go

carts themselves are housy. i want to make a company that creates a smart modular electrical cart for kids. he was the genesis of the idea. tony and i talk regularly, he's not involved in the day to day operations of the company but certainly kind of spirit you'll creator of the company. >> when you were thinking all right, here's what we should do? what did you leave out? what did you think that would be fun or no, that was dumb or too expensive or what not? >> it was the other way around. we wanted a cart that had diy capability to modify and so forth. as time went on we added more and more things to it. the whole body kit idea, we've got this formula one inspired body kit available in red or silver. going forward there will be all kinds of different body kits you can put on it. there are games developing, smart cones you can set up a race cart with and measure lap times and things like that. we're adding more and more capability for skill based

games, developing skills of the kids driving this vehicle. >> this is a somewhat small market, $1,000 go cart. >> it is. my wife and i there's nothing we love more than our kids. and if we find a toy when our kids are young that was fun and would captivate them for hours on end, it was safe, and it developed skills, that's a gold mine. people hear a go cart, initial reaction, $1,000 sounds like a lot. once they find out what it does, the reaction is it seems pretty cheap. >> mostly people in silicon valley? >> all over the country. that was one concern, you rif in silicon valley, a bubble area. but we found around the country people are willing to invest that kind of money. people in north carolina and places like that, we see are investing lots of money and various toys with our sports. >> one last question for you, a simple one. what do you like about racing. you own a racing team.

what is it that makes you happy? >> i'm a competitive guy, whether it's in business or motor sports, i like something that's complicated, something that has lots of variables in it and something that's very competitive. so i think that's what i like about racing. and it's what i like about building a new product. there are days i wonder, what have i done? but it's a very competitive market in silicon valley and we're having a blast doing it. >> press here will be back in just a moment.

that's our show for this week. my thanks to my guests. if you missed any part of the show or like to see past shows, you can check us out on presshere tv.com and on the web you can download any phone for free on itunes as well. i'm also told by my friends at apple that if you leave a review, our ranking goes higher

and higher. we would love for you to do that on itunes. i'm scott mcgrew, thanks for making us part of your sunday morning. damian trujillo: hello, and welcome to,

"comunidad del valle." i'm damian trujillo, and today farm workers who then became farmers themselves. their stories today on your "comunidad del valle." [music] male announcer: nbc bay area presents, "comunidad del valle," with damian trujillo. damian: we'll begin today with the annual holiday food drive. yes, it's that time of the year. with us here on, "comunidad del valle," is claribel chavez with the second harvest food bank, who is here to tell us about how maybe you can participate in this annual holiday food drive. welcome back to the show. claribel chavez: thank you. damian: so, tell us--i mean, it's kind of shocking to say that, "here we are again." but, here we are again. it's time to start with our donations to make sure that everybody gets to enjoy the holidays the way we would like them to. claribel: yes, well this time of the season, it's really important that we raise enough funds so that