[00:00:00] Crystal: I am here with Kristine Shachinger.
[00:00:02] Crystal: Kristine is a concierge consultant for Sites Without Walls, and we are going to have not your average conversation about AI today.
[00:00:12] Crystal: So I hope you are excited, like I am, to hear a new perspective. Or maybe something that you just don't hear all the time.
[00:00:20] Crystal: But Kristine, thank you so much for joining me on the Simple and Smart SEO Show Podcast.
[00:00:24] Kristine Schachinger: Yeah. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
[00:00:27] Crystal: Yeah.
SEO Origin Story
[00:00:27] Crystal: So the way I always like to start out could you give us, that CliffsNotes version of how you got started and where you've ended up?
[00:00:34] Kristine Schachinger: Sure. I graduated with a degree in sociology and art, which I was a barista for a year. And fortunately used my art education to get started in doing front-end development and design. Then did accessibility.
[00:00:46] Kristine Schachinger: And then was working for a company, and I was like, "Hey, there's this thing called SEO, and we're spending 4 million a year on Google clicks." at the time, that was considered a lot.
[00:00:53] Kristine Schachinger: Not so much anymore.
[00:00:54] Kristine Schachinger: So I said, "Can I do the SEO?" And they said we have this new website, and it's been up for six months, [00:01:00] and the firm we hired to do the SEO hasn't got it indexed yet. So if you can figure out why, you can start doing SEO." So I said, "Okay."
[00:01:07] Kristine Schachinger: And it only had a noindex tag on it. And yeah, so they... We were paying 20,000 a month for SEO that couldn't be done. So the VP said I could take it over since obviously I couldn't do worse. And that's how I got into SEO. So over the years I keep up all my skills just because I've been through enough economic pivots, let's just call them, where I know that this skill may not be needed today, and this one may be tomorrow.
[00:01:30] Kristine Schachinger: But since I went out on my own around 2010 or '11, I've just primarily concentrated on doing technical SEO, site recoveries, things of that nature. So I do all SEO except link building 'cause that's a whole thing unto itself.
[00:01:44] Crystal: Wow.
Site Recovery Explained
[00:01:44] Crystal: Site recoveries. I've seen you post about this on LinkedIn. What is a site recovery? Like why do people need it, and then how do you help them?
[00:01:51] Kristine Schachinger: So when Google comes along with an update and they hit your site, it's gonna be fifty percent to ninety percent loss overnight. So literally goes boop. so [00:02:00] you need someone to go in and evaluate against that update itself. First of all, whether it is an update that caused the problem. 'Cause there are other-- things can cause problems just at the same time and be coincidence. And then if it's the update, like Google's like, "Hey, it's a core update," that could be any of the ranking signals that are out there.
[00:02:14] Kristine Schachinger: So you have to evaluate the entire site, and then you help them fix it. And when the next update comes through, hopefully they get their traffic back. As long as they've got all the fixes in time, usually about three or four weeks before the new update comes out.
[00:02:26] Crystal: Okay, so we've established, what you do, who you are, all that type of stuff.
Why She Tests AI
[00:02:31] Crystal: One of the reasons why you came across my radar is because on LinkedIn, there are very few people that have, been in my orbit, or that have come across my feed initially, like you did. With ideas that are a little bit contrary to the general acceptance of AI in search.
[00:02:51] Crystal: And using ChatGPTs and LLMs for instance.
[00:02:55] Crystal: And so I noticed the other day you said that you don't use them. [00:03:00] But you test them constantly. And so I was wondering if you could just give us an example of how you test them, and what that kind of looks like.
[00:03:09] Kristine Schachinger: Sure, and I do use them a little. I just don't use them much. I don't use them for workflows. I do have a client who loves GPT, so sometimes I'll just have the GPT write the answer 'cause they believe that more over me. But generally speaking, I only use it for maybe tone cleanup in a, in, like a email I'm writing just to make sure my tone is correct or something like that. I don't wanna give the impression I never touch them.
Messy Middle Entities
[00:03:29] Kristine Schachinger: But for testing Duane Forrester published an article about there's a messy middle in AI search. And that means that the, AI does not ingest your website like Google does.
[00:03:39] Kristine Schachinger: And with its regular crawlers, it parses, and it only parses certain elements, and certain things have to be there for it to parse all the way through the document.
[00:03:46] Kristine Schachinger: So I took Kristine Shachinger loves snow 300 times in a document. That was something I did with Google Suggest years ago, where I made Google Suggest say that.
[00:03:55] Kristine Schachinger: With no corresponding documents online that supported it. So I did that, and [00:04:00] then there's still no corresponding documents online that say I love snow. And then Kristine Shachinger loves SEO 300 times, and then Kristine Shachinger loves snow again.
[00:04:07] Kristine Schachinger: And so I looked and I thought I should be the main entity," ' cause that's what they look at is entities and relationships between entities.
[00:04:13] Kristine Schachinger: Nouns for people who don't know. And I was not. The entities were SEO and snow. so I asked it to summarize what was in the document that I posted to it, and it said that I loved snow.
[00:04:24] Kristine Schachinger: And I said, "But there's more to the document." It said, "No, there's not." said, "There is more to the document," and it said, "No, there's not."
[00:04:30] Kristine Schachinger: And I said, "There is more to the document. I wrote it." And so I have found, by the way, that if you're a little rude to it, it corrects itself.
[00:04:38] Kristine Schachinger: I don't know why that is, but it just does. So I was like, "Hey, so I wrote the document. Oh my gosh, could you please just tell me what else is in the document?" And it's like, "Oh, I am so sorry."
[00:04:48] Kristine Schachinger: There is something else in the document, and it then it said, that I loved SEO. And I s- asked it because they're wrong a lot, so I do not trust the information that comes out.
[00:04:57] Kristine Schachinger: But when it comes to LLMs, they're usually pretty good about [00:05:00] understanding what an LLM does. So I asked it, "Hey, why would you have skipped that part?" And it said, the entity was not close to the other one. They were very different.
[00:05:08] Kristine Schachinger: So I just skipped over to the entity at the bottom, which was the same as the one at the top, or similar to the one at the top." If in the middle of the document, it's not comparable to the ones in opening paragraph, then it skips it. It goes away, right?
[00:05:21] Kristine Schachinger: That makes sense, but also makes sense in writing. So there's in a messy middle, there's where the author naturally would expand the writing. So you start with your tight summary, where your entities are very close together.
[00:05:31] Kristine Schachinger: If I was gonna write about iced tea and coffee, iced tea and coffee would be in my first paragraph, right? And then down the road, I might be like, "Oh, and the origin point of iced tea was yada."
[00:05:41] Kristine Schachinger: And now that's a very wide set of entities in the graph that they have. Google loves that. It gives you more visibility among searches.
[00:05:48] Kristine Schachinger: But large language models don't, so they skip it. So ugh, that's not so important. So large language models depend a lot on a structure.
[00:05:56] Kristine Schachinger: H1s, H2s, bullet points. They love [00:06:00] bullet points.
[00:06:00] Kristine Schachinger: And then the using what's called cosine relevance, which just means how closely are your nouns related, and they follow that through the document. And if they don't see something that's related, then they just skip it, and they go to the next thing.
Homepage Structure Tips
[00:06:11] Crystal: Okay, so that is very interesting, and I'm wondering, like, how do we apply that knowledge directly to, say, a homepage?
[00:06:20] Kristine Schachinger: I'm working with a lawyer who does brain injuries, right? So if I put in the title brain injury, TBI, traumatic brain injury.
[00:06:27] Kristine Schachinger: Those are very closely related, so the LLM loves that. If I say brain injury, TBI, and halfway down the document I say something like neurological deficits related to brain injury, the large language model is gonna skip that.
[00:06:38] Kristine Schachinger: Cause it doesn't care about neurological deficits 'cause
[00:06:40] Kristine Schachinger: too wide. Cosine relevance is an actual score. It's not re-related too closely. But Google likes that, so you wouldn't wanna remove it. But you might add in the h-header, the H1, H2, or a bullet point.
[00:06:52] Kristine Schachinger: Or at the end in the summary, or an FAQ at the bottom. That's where they came from, the idea of FAQs at the bottom.
[00:06:57] Kristine Schachinger: These entities in close [00:07:00] on the page.
[00:07:00] Kristine Schachinger: And then cosine relevance, which is easy to look up. There are tools that do that. And so you wanna make sure you just incorporate those throughout the page. So the parser will follow.
[00:07:09] Kristine Schachinger: It does need its structure.
[00:07:10] Kristine Schachinger: It's like SEO two thousand and two. I wasn't in yet then, but let's say two thousand and five.
[00:07:14] Kristine Schachinger: We used to care about H1s and H2s, like they had to be there correctly.
[00:07:17] Kristine Schachinger: And we used to care about making sure all our HTML was semantically correct.
[00:07:21] Kristine Schachinger: And you have to do that again.
[00:07:23] Kristine Schachinger: Because there's an accessibility tree for agentic SEO, and then there's also the HTML structure that they need to have the entities in.
Accessibility Tree Basics
[00:07:30] Crystal: Okay, so this is the second time today that I've heard the term accessibility tree.
[00:07:36] Crystal: But I have never really heard of that before. Can you explain that to me? What is an accessibility tree?
[00:07:41] Kristine Schachinger: Sure. It's actually really simple. So, sites should do this already, but most don't. There's something called the WCAG AA standard two-point... I think it's on 2.2 right now, which outlines how your site has to work for people who have disabilities. Especially like screen readers or disability devices.
[00:07:57] Kristine Schachinger: Someone can't move their arms and legs, they're gonna use a blower, things of that [00:08:00] nature. So your website has to be coded a certain way. In there is the accessibility tree. And the agentic bot uses parts of the accessibility tree. Just a few parts. To follow along and parse the document.
[00:08:11] Kristine Schachinger: Instead of divs everywhere, in accessibility, you'd be like, "This is the nav. This is the content. This is the form," and the divs will explain that. "This is the footer." So it can follow along that way.
[00:08:22] Kristine Schachinger: 'Cause people have to remember, we're talking to bots. We're talking to machine learning. They're not reading, and they turn everything into math.
[00:08:29] Kristine Schachinger: So the clearer you are, the better your structure. Then, when it looks at the words even, they're not looking at words. They're looking at the mathematical representation of the words.
[00:08:38] Crystal: Yes, I love that. I'm actually learning about bits and bytes and, ones and zero and the whole binary system. I find it so fascinating that computers have figured out a way to quantify nearly everything in the world between zero and one. In different variations using zero and one.
[00:08:57] Crystal: So it's so crazy. But just a quick question, [00:09:00] does Google use the accessibility tree as well, or is that something unique to LLMs?
[00:09:05] Kristine Schachinger: This is the agentic tree, so yes. So this isn't your regular LLM optimization, but you should do it anyways 'cause you should have an accessible website. but the accessibility tree is for the agentic bots.
[00:09:17] Kristine Schachinger: So yes, Google's gonna be using that for shopping quite heavily.
[00:09:20] Kristine Schachinger: And they're all gonna use that same layer.
[00:09:22] Kristine Schachinger: There's not gonna be something unique. LLMs interpret pages differently depending on the LLM or how they interpret the cosine relevance or what they use for citations. But the agentic bot is just basically a machine: " Hey, can you read this page?" " Yes, I can read this page, if the accessibility tree is there."
[00:09:38] Crystal: What if the answer is no, I can't read it?
[00:09:41] Kristine Schachinger: Then it just won't ingest it. We don't know how much agentic is really gonna matter as far as shopping.
[00:09:46] Kristine Schachinger: In our industry, some think it's gonna be the biggest thing since sliced bread. I tend to think that people aren't gonna trust it. To let a bot go buy things for them without them being the one at the wheel. So we'll see. But they're already using it in their I believe the UCP uses it, [00:10:00] though I'm not 100% sure.
[00:10:01] Crystal: Okay.
Tools To Audit Accessibility
[00:10:01] Crystal: I teach Shopify sellers particularly creatives. People who are moving from Etsy to Shopify, building their own website.
[00:10:07] Crystal: So one thing I've learned over the years is that a lot of things that you'd think would be naturally included in a CMS like Shopify. something like an agentic tree would be already pre-built in. Do you know whether that's true or not?
[00:10:21] Kristine Schachinger: I don't know if Shopify is, but if they're doing accessibility like I know Wix does accessibility, it should be. The Lighthouse testing in Chrome Developer Tools will do an agentic test. So it will tell you if the accessibility tree is there, and if it's not, what's missing.
[00:10:35] Kristine Schachinger: I'm working on a website right now that we're rolling out, and it's like you're missing button text labels, which I know. That's something that it measured in the agentic test. So yeah. So it's really simple. And agentic stuff, accessibility stuff is not like a full accessibility redo on your website. These are very small items that need to be added, but again.
[00:10:51] Kristine Schachinger: You should be doing it. The market for people who have disabilities online is massive. Just in travel alone 10 years ago, it was a $13 billion market.
[00:10:59] Crystal: [00:11:00] So I have a couple of comments to make about that, and then I'll move on from this, but this is so fascinating. I'm like, "Okay, I gotta find out as much as I can about all this." Is there a way to assess your website and identify quickly any accessibility issues that are missing?
[00:11:15] Crystal: Is that what you were just talking about with the developer tools?
[00:11:18] Kristine Schachinger: Yeah. So Chrome Developer Tools Lighthouse test, you can add an agentic test that will basically tell you.
[00:11:24] Kristine Schachinger: Also, Screaming Frog and Sitebulb, which are very cheap, inexpensive tools, have an accessibility check. Now that's a full accessibility check, not just agentic tree. So if you just wanna check the agentic tree, check the Lighthouse test in Chrome Developer Tools. If you want a more accessible website, check Sitebulb and Screaming Frog. If you really have to have an accessible site, hire a specialist 'cause I've done that for the government and things like that. And that's a much more involved process. - But just those general tests will tell you if you're accessible for agents.
Accessibility Lawsuits Reality
[00:11:51] Crystal: So, last comment on this particular topic. Kind of an anecdotal story.
[00:11:56] Crystal: A few months ago, last year sometime I was notified [00:12:00] via email that I had used a couple of images incorrectly on my website, on my Shopify store, in my Shopify blog. And this blog was from 2020 during social distancing times, and I'd used an image that I found, and I always do a free image search.
[00:12:15] Crystal: And so I'm not sure how this happened, but there's two images and they were not supposed to be used on my blog without permission or without paying for them. Initially when I got the email, I thought, "Ooh, I'm just gonna take these down and ignore it," because part of it feels like spam, and part of it feels like a shakedown.
[00:12:32] Crystal: And I don't know which one it is, and so I'm just gonna take it off.
[00:12:34] Crystal: And, according to Google Search Console, I'd gotten a whopping zero views and visitors to this particular page in the last, however many months. So I was like, "Look, no harm, no foul. I'm just gonna take it down."
[00:12:44] Crystal: In comes the lawyers, right? A few thousand dollars worth of demand letters later, I find out the hard way that y- this is not the way you wanna go about it.
[00:12:53] Crystal: And side note to anybody with an e-commerce store: one negative about using images that are not your own on your blog is that [00:13:00] when it's attached to your e-commerce store, the fines go up exponentially. So anyway, having said that...
[00:13:06] Kristine Schachinger: pretty sure I know what company this is, so
[00:13:08] Crystal: Yeah.
[00:13:08] Kristine Schachinger: yeah.
[00:13:09] Crystal: Yeah.
[00:13:09] Kristine Schachinger: Yeah.
[00:13:10] Crystal: they're fun.
[00:13:11] Kristine Schachinger: Yeah.
[00:13:11] Crystal: Yeah. So I learned that the hard way, but then I heard recently that there's a new push for people crawling your website to decide if it's as- accessible, and if it's not, now sending a demand letter or suing you on that.
[00:13:27] Crystal: And I just wondered if you'd heard anything about that or had any thoughts, tips, stories?
[00:13:32] Kristine Schachinger: Oh, yeah. That's the new ambulance chasing.
[00:13:35] Kristine Schachinger: Like years ago, that came from when lawyers would go to hospitals and find someone who was injured in an accident. And sign them up as a case. Now they do it with websites. It's much easier, much more lucrative. Most of the time though, if you have made the attempt to be accessible. And it's just a small thing, like these button labels right now I'm working on.
[00:13:52] Kristine Schachinger: You could go to court, they're not gonna fine against you. It's usually if it's egregious or if you've been informed before. It used to be Department of [00:14:00] Justice did that. So before the lawyers started doing it.
[00:14:02] Kristine Schachinger: So I got a letter at a company I was working at one time that our car section wasn't available to someone who was blind.
[00:14:10] Kristine Schachinger: And I know we go, "Ha ha ha," but the person was looking for the person who would be driving them. So they did need access to that. And the site-- It was overlooked on the site because people thought hey, they're blind and why would they need cars?"
[00:14:21] Kristine Schachinger: So we got a letter from the Department of Justice, and we fixed it, and we let them know, and they dropped it all. But lawyers are different. If a lawyer's looking for a payday, you definitely want to talk to a lawyer because I am not a lawyer, and I can't give legal advice. But I would say most of the time, if you fix it, if it's not too egregious, if it hasn't been something you've been told about over and over again.
[00:14:38] Kristine Schachinger: That the court's not gonna find against you. But uh, you do need to make sure your site's accessible. It's also really good for business. When I worked at Zappos, I was embedded there for nine months. Zappos found that there are people with disabilities who had one arm, one foot, one leg, whatever it happened to be. And they wanted shoes, but they...
[00:14:54] Kristine Schachinger: Or they wanted a jacket or whatever it happened to be, but they didn't wanna have to pay for an extra shoe that they could never [00:15:00] use, right? So Zappos started actually selling one shoe.
[00:15:03] Kristine Schachinger: Or, yeah, or one glove or one whatever it happened to be that they were selling. And it turned into a very lucrative market for them. And like in travel, I live in Las Vegas.
[00:15:12] Kristine Schachinger: We're one of the cities that is most easy for people to travel around when they have wheelchairs or they have assistive devices because we're a new city and everything was built to accessibility codes. Most of the buildings on the Strip are, have-- were built after 1995. So it's a huge market for here, right? Because people come here. We're one of the top five cities that have those devices.
[00:15:31] Kristine Schachinger: So at the time when I did the research for a company ten years ago, it was a thirteen billion dollar market potential. Which is nothing to sneeze at. So when people don't do accessibility and you just tell them "Do the right thing," it's like, "Meh." We might get sued. Nah, they're not worried about that. But if you say, "Hey, you can make a lot of money by serving populations." '
[00:15:46] Kristine Schachinger: Cause as people get older also, they don't do well with screens. And their eyes change, and we have a m- aging population, and the... If your contrasts are bad or your font sizes are too small, they can't use your site. So [00:16:00] it's just simple things that can make it so much better for the accessibility population. Sorry, I don't mean to go on. It's one of my little pet, pet...
[00:16:06] Crystal: you're right that it's sad that it takes us those types of motivations to do it the correct way. But, hopefully at the end of the day it gets done. I have a quick anecdotal story about that because I have one of those problems now that I can't read small print, without reading glasses or whatever.
[00:16:21] Crystal: And just the other day I was at Chick-fil-A, and I had gotten a free drink of some kind that was in my app, it was a coffee and it was dinner time, so I didn't want to, drink a coffee late at night, but I couldn't see when it expired. So I'm like trying to show the girl that's taking my order "When does this expire?
[00:16:38] Crystal: Can you tell me?" Because I couldn't read it. And it's not that I have vision problems per se, but it was so small that I could not read it on my own. So just a note to Chick-fil-A, if you're listening let's go ahead and make those expiration dates a little larger.
[00:16:51] Kristine Schachinger: also board games. I play a lot of board games, and you wouldn't believe how bad the contrast and fine print is. But I have a dry eye issue. I have autoimmune [00:17:00] issue with my eyes, right? And it's gotten really severe this year. And I would look at the screen and everything's blurry, and everything was deformed, and I thought there's something wrong with my retina or something, right? No, I just have really dry eyes.
[00:17:12] Kristine Schachinger: The oils that are supposed to keep the tears on your eyes to keep them from being dry, they don't stay. So I have like four drops now that I have to take. But when I would look at a screen on my phone, the fonts are all this light gray and small and thin. And then the white of the screen was so bright to my eyes that I couldn't read the phone. I'm like, "I'm trying to read... I can't read it." Literally and it would just happen over time during the day. It would just suddenly at 6:00, can't read phones.
[00:17:36] Kristine Schachinger: So people should be aware that these are small things you can do on your site that make it better not only for people, but for also the agent bots.
[00:17:44] Kristine Schachinger: Because when the bot crawls your site, everything has to be clear and easy to get to. Font size and color, they don't care about as much, obviously, but the agentic tree is the accessibility tree.
[00:17:54] Crystal: Okay, last anecdotal story, then we'll get back to our regularly scheduled program. I was working on a website, [00:18:00] an older WordPress website.
[00:18:01] Crystal: And I was going through it with one of the people from the company that I was working for and working with.
[00:18:06] Crystal: And I had increased the space between paragraphs because the spacer, the natural spacer, was very narrow,.
[00:18:14] Crystal: And the way that the WordPress site had been set up it just... it didn't look good on mobile. It really was crammed together. So I'm watching, but on on a desktop, it kinda looked like there was too much space. And so I'm just cringing because as we're going down the blog together, she's adjusting the spaces to make them smaller, and I'm like, " But I just thought it was so funny 'cause I was like, yeah, you have to think about what it looks like on the phone, not just the desktop.
[00:18:40] Crystal: So thankfully, their theme has now been updated, and it looks great, as it is. So funny.
Vibe Coding Risks
[00:18:45] Crystal: Okay, so let's talk about vibe coding. So vibe coding is something I've been guilty of doing. I can't lie, okay? I can't lie. But it's where people build things with AI without the full ability to understand what it's doing. [00:19:00] So why does that combination concern you?
[00:19:02] Kristine Schachinger: So if you're just doing it for yourself, that's fine, right? You're just trying to do something for you. That's okay. First of all, by the way, if you're doing websites with it, make sure it can even be read by Google. I tested a few, and they were all JavaScript modules. And when I ran the Screaming Frog Screenshots over it, 'cause they can see what Googlebot sees. The pages were completely blank. just because it shows in a browser does not mean that the Googlebot can see it, right?
[00:19:23] Kristine Schachinger: China just ran a test on vibe coders versus developers who vibe coded. And the vibe coding puts in a lot more vulnerabilities, which by the way, you're legally responsible for if you make that what you vibe coded public.
[00:19:35] Kristine Schachinger: So in the state of California, you can sue the developer for any damages that occur from a code that you create. Not just the company, but you yourself as a developer. So when you vibe code something and you just throw it out there vibe coding puts in a lot of vulnerabilities, and if you don't know the logic or how it works, you don't know that they exist.
[00:19:51] Kristine Schachinger: Developers who vibe code know the logic. They know how to prompt the logic. They know how to make sure the logic is there. But someone who doesn't code [00:20:00] doesn't.
[00:20:00] Kristine Schachinger: And doesn't know that could be there. So I worry about the people who actually do it and don't tell people. Also, I think you should always tell people it's not a law at this point, if you vibe coded something because it is a vulnerability point. And so I'm not for vibe coding for anything that's gonna be put on the market that people are gonna sell.
[00:20:16] Kristine Schachinger: You could be exposing people to security risks that you're unaware of. Also just risks from the code being bad. The vibe coding is not better than a real developer.
[00:20:24] Kristine Schachinger: Again, if you're doing a minimal viable product for your startup, if you're doing stuff for yourself and you wanna take the risk for yourself, no problem.
[00:20:30] Kristine Schachinger: That's your deal, like I don't care. But if you're putting it out there for people to use, then you should be telling them that it's vibe coded.
[00:20:37] Kristine Schachinger: And you should also tell them whether you had a developer review the code or not after it was put out there. So China found that the vibe coders, and I might have the exact numbers 100% correct.
[00:20:46] Kristine Schachinger: We covered it on my podcast a couple weeks ago. But they had 40% more errors.
[00:20:51] Kristine Schachinger: And like far more issues because they didn't know the errors even existed. So the developer knew how to do what needed to be done and logic it out and then prompt it [00:21:00] properly. The person who didn't have any history did not.
[00:21:03] Crystal: It's interesting because I think about people when they draft their terms and, different documents or whatever, it's like always have this reviewed by a lawyer. Or an attorney. And now it's always have your code, your vibe code reviewed by a actual programmer, so I think that's that's very helpful.
Hackers And Liability
[00:21:19] Kristine Schachinger: I should jump in with a little history. I go to DEF CON every year, which is the hacker conference here in Vegas. I also go to Black Hat, which is the professional cybersecurity conference. I only do it... I'm not a hacker. I do it so I understand what people can do to a website, so I know to recognize the signs. I know how creative they can be. I know what they can do. So once it's, people are mass producing vibe codes from certain types of products, I'm not sure I'm 100% maybe, but pretty sure it's gonna happen. In the early days, Macs did not get hacked, and everyone's like, "Oh, 'cause the security is so good."
[00:21:51] Kristine Schachinger: No, there just weren't enough people using Macs to make it worth their while. They didn't care.
[00:21:54] Kristine Schachinger: So then there were enough Macs, and now Mac has security. Not 'cause Macs got worse, but because there are enough to care about. Now, when people [00:22:00] are vibe coding, it's like, "Oh, there's only so many people, so many apps," you know?
[00:22:03] Kristine Schachinger: It's not a general thing. If suddenly it becomes where everyone's vibe coding from, say, some popular tool, the hackers are gonna know what the vulnerabilities are in that code.
[00:22:11] Kristine Schachinger: And they'll use it against the people who are vibe coding. So people have to be aware that when you don't know what the s- the security risks are, that hackers are very creative people. And if you just go to a, a DEF CON once, you're like, " Gosh, I wanna be mad at you for that, but I can't 'cause it's so brilliant and it's so simple." One girl used ad networks. This isn't about vibe coding, but just a one of those ones where it's oh my gosh, you're brilliant and I hate you at the same time.
[00:22:32] Kristine Schachinger: She used ad networks was back at that time, were incredibly vulnerable because ad networks never checked the scripts that were being put into the ad network.
[00:22:40] Kristine Schachinger: So at this time, they were starting to change, so she was trying to find a way around it. what she did is when you touch the page, it's sent from a script, a benign script in the ad unit, to translate a word back to the site, right?
[00:22:54] Kristine Schachinger: You just had to touch the page, and that word is what triggered the ma- the payload, right? The [00:23:00] malware. But no security scan would ever see it because it wasn't there until you touched the page and created the script.
[00:23:06] Kristine Schachinger: And triggered it to go off, right? By the word going to a dictionary, a Google dictionary, and changing. Translate, Google Translate and changing. So they're very creative people. So just be careful with vibe coding because it's it's fine if, like I said, developers who know what they're doing, they can at least test for the vulnerabilities, prompt for the vulnerabilities, know the logic to prevent the vulnerabilities.
[00:23:24] Kristine Schachinger: It won't be 100%. nothing's 100%, but at least you'll have a better chance of it. If you're just like, "Hey guys, I'm gonna go put this on the app market," and suddenly a million people are using it and hackers are like, "Cool. I found the vulnerabilities in that app a million people are using, and now I've attacked it." Now you are responsible for that attack.
[00:23:42] Crystal: Wow. It, again, so interesting. You've said so many things today that are like, I just have a, I have a connection with that. My mother-in-law, she has the autoimmune dry eye thing. And she just told me about that a couple weeks ago. And the hacker conference, that sounds so interesting to me.
[00:23:56] Crystal: I'm actually going to school right now [00:24:00] to get my cyber certificate. I know you don't have to go to school, but I'm like, "I need the foundation." There's so much of that's happening in AI that I feel like I'm missing some of those basic computer operation foundations. So I was like, "You know what?
[00:24:13] Crystal: I'm just going back and I'm gonna, get the certifications and all that type of stuff." So yeah. Yeah. I'm working on that right now. Yeah.
[00:24:19] Kristine Schachinger: if you come next year, let me know.
[00:24:21] Crystal: Okay.
[00:24:21] Kristine Schachinger: down low on how to keep yourself safe.
[00:24:23] Crystal: Okay. Yeah. What, what part of the year is it?
[00:24:25] Kristine Schachinger: It's in August. It's always the first week in
[00:24:28] Crystal: Always in August. Okay. If I don't make it next year, I'll make it the following year because I'll still be in school or finishing up my program.
[00:24:34] Crystal: But I'll be hopefully taking the exam at some point, before that.
[00:24:38] Kristine Schachinger: you do not need to be an expert to come 'cause they like to teach people.
[00:24:41] Crystal: Oh, okay
[00:24:42] Kristine Schachinger: people on old school stuff, and they don't allow AI in any of their challenges.
[00:24:46] Crystal: Oh
[00:24:47] Kristine Schachinger: have lock picking sessions.
[00:24:50] Kristine Schachinger: Tamper-resistant, how to get through that, how to security hack something.
[00:24:54] Kristine Schachinger: There's all sorts of stuff.
[00:24:55] Crystal: Yeah.
[00:24:56] Kristine Schachinger: You don't have to be an expert to come.
[00:24:57] Crystal: And I didn't even realize I've been repeating things [00:25:00] that may obviously according to what I've just learned here, are not true. Like I have a MacBook, and I'm like, I've told my dad like, "Oh, you need Apple products. You need the MacBook because it's less vulnerable to viruses and different things."
[00:25:13] Crystal: And I just, I thought that was true. I thought it had something to do with its operating system.
[00:25:16] Kristine Schachinger: It's more secure than Windows.
[00:25:18] Crystal: Okay
[00:25:19] Kristine Schachinger: your phone is definitely more secure than an Android. just saying that there's this, there was this idea for many years that you don't need any security software on a Mac 'cause nobody hacks Macs. And it's yeah, no- nobody uses them at the time.
[00:25:30]
