Category Archives: Uncategorized

How Much Does the Product Cost?

It’s a simple question. “How much does the product cost?”

How much does the product cost?

But some salespeople treat this like a nuclear secret and will only release the information after you sit through a 90 minute timeshare presentation.

No, you’re not listening to me!

Well, my rates haven’t changed since May.

  • Work with me on an hourly basis at the $100/hour rate.
  • For text between 400 and 600 words (short writing service), I can bill a flat rate of $500.
  • For text between 2800 and 3200 words (medium writing service), I can bill a flat rate of $2000.
  • We can work out a flat rate for different lengths if needed. 
Bredemarket 400 Short Writing Service. Price as of November 7, 2025.Download
Bredemarket 2800 Medium Writing Service. Price as of November 7, 2025.Download

Let’s talk.

And yes, I even provide my prices in video form.

The Healthy Otter: When AI Transcriptions are HIPAA Compliant

When I remember to transcribe my meetings, and when I CAN transcribe my meetings, my meeting transcriber of choice happens to be otter.ai. And if I’m talking to a healthcare prospect or client, and when they grant permission to transcribe, the result is HIPAA compliant.

Otter.ai explains the features that provide this:

Getting HIPAA compliant wasn’t just about checking a box – we’ve implemented some serious security upgrades:

  • Better encryption to keep protected health information (PHI) locked down
  • Tighter access controls so only the right people see sensitive data
  • Team training to make sure everyone knows HIPAA inside and out
  • Regular security audits to stay on top of our game

This builds on our existing SOC 2 Type II certification, so you’re getting enterprise-grade security across the board.

HIPAA privacy protections affect you everywhere.

Introduction to Bredemarket: Services, Process, and Pricing (2511a)

Here’s a new video that lets you know about Bredemarket: who I (John E. Bredehoft) am, what services Bredemarket provides, the process Bredemarket uses, and Bredemarket’s pricing.

Bredemarket: Services, Process, and Pricing.

But why…why did I create it?

Stealing from James Tuckerman

So I was reading my emails one day, and I saw how James Tuckerman created a video to introduce himself to prospects. This allowed Tuckerman, based in Australia, to introduce himself to prospects around the world without having to wake up in the middle of the night.

Now Bredemarket doesn’t do business outside the United States (with one exception), but I could certainly use an introduction video.

Wait…I already did that

Then I remembered that I already had several “talkies” from the time when I branded myself as a “CPA”—a content, proposal, analysis expert.

And one of the talkies covered a lot of ground, even pricing.

But it was long, it dragged at times, it was incomplete, and it lacked a couple of my recent branding changes.

You go back, Jack, do it again

So here’s my first cut at a new introduction video. 

  • It’s not a “talkie,” since I wanted to keep it below 90 seconds. 
  • And I may play with different edits. 

But for now, this is my introduction video. Enjoy.

Bredemarket: Services, Process, and Pricing

Here’s the video.

Bredemarket: Services, Process, and Pricing.

And if you want to discuss my services with me, visit https://bredemarket.com/mark/ and book a free meeting.

Stop losing prospects! Use Bredemarket content for tech marketers

A Fingerprint Identification Story: Bobby Driscoll

In early 1968, two boys found a dead body in New York’s East Village. There was no identification on the man, and no one in the neighborhood knew him. He was fingerprinted and buried in a mass grave, identified by the NYPD nearly two years later.

Potter’s Field monument, Hart Island. From Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0.

In the 1960s, fingerprint identification of deceased persons—a laborious process in those days—often happened because the deceased had a criminal record.

And Bobby Driscoll did. 

His first arrest was in 1956, but he was not convicted of any crime until 1961.

“On May 1, 1961, he was arrested for attempting to cash a check that had been stolen from a liquor store the previous January, and at the same time was also charged with driving under the influence of drugs. He pled guilty to both charges and was sentenced to six months of treatment for drug addiction at the California Institute for Men at Chino.”

Driscoll reportedly cleaned up (his drug of choice was heroin), went east to New York City, and even achieved some fame.

“[H]e purportedly settled into Andy Warhol’s Greenwich Village art community known as “The Factory.” During this time, he also participated in an underground film entitled Dirt, directed by avant-garde filmmaker Piero Heliczer.”

But this was not Driscoll’s first film. He had been in a few films earlier in life.

From Wikipedia. Fair use in this form.

Here he is (in the upper right corner) playing Johnny in the Disney movie Song of the South.

From Wikipedia. Public domain.

And he provided the voice for the lead character in the later Disney movie Peter Pan.

Yes, Bobby Driscoll was a child star for Disney and other studios before appearing in Dirt.

But right after Driscoll’s voice became famous in Peter Pan, Disney declined to renew his contract. The reason? Acne…and the fact that he wasn’t a cute kid any more.

AI generated by Grok.

This led to his tailspin, which eventually led to his fingerprinting.

And his positive identification after his death.

EBTS the Movie, “Inside the FBI’s EBTS”: Using Google’s NotebookLM to Create Videos From Non-Copyrighted Material

Do you want to skip the book and watch the movie version? Thanks to Google’s NotebookLM, you can.

I used the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Electronic Biometric Transmission Specification (EBTS) for this exercise.

What should you NOT upload to NotebookLM?

But there’s two things I need to say about the EBTS:

  • First, the EBTS is a public document and not a top secret document. You can download the EBTS yourself from the https://fbibiospecs.fbi.gov/ebts-1/approved-ebts-1 URL. For my test I used version 11.3 of the EBTS from earlier this year.
  • Second, the EBTS is a public domain document and is not copyrighted. This is something I need to emphasize. If you’re going to take a magazine article and make a movie out of it, the copyright holder may have something to say about that.

Both points are important. If you want to upload your employer’s confidential report into NotebookLM for analysis…well, you probably shouldn’t. But the public, non-copyrighted EBTS is safe for this exercise.

Uploading the EBTS to NotebookLM

So I uploaded the EBTS into NotebookLM, and as expected, I received a short text sumnmary of the document.

“This document outlines the technical specifications for the electronic exchange of biometric and biographic information between various law enforcement agencies and the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Next Generation Identification (NGI) System. It details the Transaction Offense Types (TOTs), which are the standardized requests and responses used for services such as identification, verification, investigation, and data management. Furthermore, the text specifies the precise data fields, formats, and codes required for the submission and retrieval of diverse biometric data, including fingerprints, palm prints, facial images, and iris scans, while also setting forth image quality specifications for scanner and printer certification.”

Now I could continue to query NotebookLM about the document, but I chose to request a video overview instead. This feature was introduced a few months ago, but I missed it.

“Video Overviews transform the sources in your notebook into a video of AI-narrated slides, pulling images, diagrams, quotes, and numbers from your documents. They distill complex information into clear, digestible content, providing a comprehensive and engaging visual deep dive of your material.” 

So I launched the video overview creation feature, and waited. As I waited, I mused upon the time it would take me to create this video manually, and I also mused on the usual LLM warning that the result may contain inaccuracies.

I didn’t have to wait that long, maybe 15 minutes, and Google delivered this 7-minute video.

Inside the FBI’s EBTS. Created by Google NotebookLM based upon EBTS Version 11.3.

Not too bad…especially considering that the video was created based upon a single source. Imagine if I had provided multiple sources, such as an old version of the Electronic Fingerprint Transmission Specification (EFTS); then the video may have covered the evolution of the standard.

Oh, and I also created a 12-minute audio version, which NotebookLM structures as a two-host podcast. This is similar to the podcast I generated in late 2024 about…me.

Unpacking the EBTS standard. Created by Google NotebookLM based upon EBTS Version 11.3.

In an environment where many people like to watch or listen rather than read, this helps provide a quick overview. But you still have to dive into the document and read it to truly understand it.

The Quantum Fraudster: Why RSA-4096 and Your Strongest Passwords Will Soon Be Trivial to Break

Are your fraud protections obsolete before the quantum era even begins? I previously wrote about algorithms that purport to protect against quantum-powered fraud. See my October post “Is the Quantum Security Threat Solved Before It Arrives? Probably Not.”

Let’s take a step back from Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Standards (NIST FIPS 204) and see what quantum-infused fraudsters can do to bypass your security protections. Your “practically unbreakable” security system today may be wide open in 10 years…or 5 years.

Shor’s Algorithm

To understand how fraud can occur, you need to understand (Peter) Shor’s Factoring Algorithm.

Peter Shor speaking after receiving the 2017 Dirac Medal from the ICTP. By International Centre for Theoretical Physics, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75565986.

According to Classiq, Shor’s Factoring Algorithm can find the prime factors of any number, including very large numbers.

“Factoring numbers with Shor’s algorithm begins with selecting a random integer smaller than the number to be factored. The classically-calculated greatest common divisor (GCD) of these two numbers, the random number and the target number, is then used to determine whether the target number has already been factored accidentally. For smaller numbers, that’s a possibility. For larger numbers, a supercomputer could be needed. And for numbers that are believed to be cryptographically secure, a quantum computer will be needed.”

So what? I appreciate that people like the late Richard Crandall were into finding prime numbers with 20th century technology, but how does that relate to whether a fraudster can drain my bank account?

Breaking RSA encryption

It definitely relates, according to the MIT Technology Review. This article was written back in 2019.

“[C]omputer scientists consider it practically impossible for a classical computer to factor numbers that are longer than 2048 bits, which is the basis of the most commonly used form of RSA encryption.

“Shor showed that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could do this with ease, a result that sent shock waves through the security industry.  

“And since then, quantum computers have been increasing in power. In 2012, physicists used a four-qubit quantum computer to factor 143. Then in 2014 they used a similar device to factor 56,153.”

The largest recent record number that I found was 261,980,999,226,229, as described in this paper. It should be noted that many of these numbers were factored by a variety of methods: using a pure Shor’s Factoring Algorithm, the maximum number factored so far is 21.

What does this mean?

So what does this mean for 2048-bit encryption? 2048 bits is equivalent to hundreds of decimal digits. I’ve found different numbers of decimal digits, but for all practical purposes I can’t calculate them anyway. Heck, I can’t calculate trillions in my head. And there’s RSA-4096 encryption, but…well, we’ll get to that.

But when quantum calculating abilities can crack algorithms, then it’s trivial to compute the number of combinations to crack an encryption…or guess a password…or generate a face.

From Microchip:

“Brute force attacks function by calculating every possible combination of passwords. As the password’s strength increases, the amount of time to crack it increases exponentially. So, in theory, if hackers tried to brute force their way into a key with AES-128 encryption, it would take approximately 1 billion years to crack with the best hardware available today [2023].

“But what if we lived in a post-quantum computing world? How long would a brute-force attack on popular cypher technologies take?…[We’re] likely still a decade or two away from Quantum computers that can easily break many of the cypher technologies in use today….

“[I]n a recently published report from Global Risk Institute (GRI), the time to break RSA-4096, which is practically impossible to break with classical computing technology, is under three days with a theoretical 1 megaqubit computer. While we are still a long way from a 1 megaqubit computer, the resources and time required are reducing rapidly at the same time we see advancements in Quantum computing which are in development.”

Yes, even RSA-4096 is vulnerable.

Now many claim that AES encryption such as AES-256 is quantum resistant, but even AES may have been breached, if you believe the claims of Chinese researchers. (But that’s a big if.)

I have no idea how much lattice-based access control mitigates these threats, but if you go around saying that strong encryption will never be broken, you are a fool.

What is the NIST FIPS 204 Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Standard?

In this edition of The Repurposeful Life, I’m revisiting a prior post (“Is the Quantum Security Threat Solved Before It Arrives? Probably Not.“) and extracting just the part that deals with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 204.

Thales used the NIST “FIPS 204 standard to define a digital signature algorithm for a new quantum-resistant smartcard: MultiApp 5.2 Premium PQC.”

The NIST FIPS 204 standard, “Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Standard,” can be found here. This is the abstract:

“Digital signatures are used to detect unauthorized modifications to data and to authenticate the identity of the signatory. In addition, the recipient of signed data can use a digital signature as evidence in demonstrating to a third party that the signature was, in fact, generated by the claimed signatory. This is known as non-repudiation since the signatory cannot easily repudiate the signature at a later time. This standard specifies ML-DSA, a set of algorithms that can be used to generate and verify digital signatures. ML-DSA is believed to be secure, even against adversaries in possession of a large-scale quantum computer.”

ML-DSA stands for “Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Algorithm.”

Now I’ll admit I don’t know a lattice from a vertical fence post, especially when it comes to quantum computing, so I’ll have to take NIST’s word for it that modules and lattice are super-good security.

Google Gemini.

But wait, there’s more!

Since I wrote my original post in October, I’ve read NordVPN’s definition of a lattice on its lattice-based access control (LBAC) page.

“A lattice is a hierarchical structure that consists of levels, each representing a set of access rights. The levels are ordered based on the level of access they grant, from more restrictive to more permissive.”

You can see how this fits into an access control mechanism, whether you’re talking about a multi-tenant cloud (NordVPN’s example) or a smartcard (Thales’ example).

Because there are some things that Tom Sawyer can access, but Injun Joe must not access.

Google Gemini.

If Only Job Applicant Deepfake Detection Were This Easy

In reality, job applicant deepfake detection is (so far) unable to determine who the fraudster really is, but it can determine who the fraudster is NOT.

Something to remember when hiring people for sensitive positions. You don’t want to unknowingly hire a North Korean spy.