Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

Airing date: 05/15/2019

Risks Of Upgrading Windows – Pokemon Changed Our Brains – New Google Privacy Feature Coming

Craig Peterson  0:00 
Hey, good morning everybody Craig Peterson here. This morning, I got to answer some questions. I helped Ken out with how to upgrade his Windows machine. Gave some, I think the best advice possible when it comes to an upgrade. And it’s not just upgrades for Windows but we talked a little bit about Mac, I gave him some hints on what to do, because on his Mac, he’s got windows seven, as well as Mac OS, he’s got to get to Windows 10. So we talked about that. We talked about a Pokemon region in the brain of adults. Now this is kind of cool, too. And why is Facebook a government protected monopoly? What’s that all about? And Google, automatically deleting our data? So all of that and a couple extra things too this morning with Ken and Matt. It was kind of a fun time again today. What a week. Alright, guys, we will be back Saturday with our weekly radio show wrap up. Take care of and I have a big warning too but you’ll hear that right near the beginning.

Matt Gagnon 1:05
He’s back ladies and gentlemen Craig Peterson, our tech guru. He’s at this time every Wednesday. And it happens to be Wednesday at this time. So he’s back again. Craig, How are you this morning?

Craig 1:18
I’m doing great. How are you guys?

Ken Altshuler 1:19
You know, the other day I was going to email you because I had a question. I forgot what it was. But another question has come up since then you have recommended everybody should upgrade to Windows 10. Correct?

Craig 1:30
At the very least Yes. And there’s a huge, by the way, a huge I mean, how does President Trump pronounce it? There’s a huge which is a new pronunciation, security vulnerability on every Intel processor made since 2011. I mean, we haven’t had anything this bad in like for ever. So those people that are on my email list and my text list are going to get a link today with more information. But this came out yesterday. And all of the major guys Microsoft and Apple have already issued patches are there they’re working on they’ve got them done. They should be out soon. But this is we’ve never seen anything this bad before. Thanks Intel. But of course your iPhones are fine. And other Samsung Galaxies and anything that’s not using an Intel chip is ok. But this is like the hugest security problem we have seen I think maybe in a decade or two so anyway.

Ken 2:43
So when I upgrade to Windows 10. And is it something I can do or do I need somebody who knows something about computers like Matt could do it for me?

Craig 2:50
Well, if you can’t handle…

Matt 2:53
He says this in the wake by the way of me having to clean up his computer last Friday.

Ken 2:56
Evidently I had asked Jeeves on it. I don’t know how I put it on and they really made fun of me and and I was ashamed. They shamed me.

Matt 3:06
He was shamed. 

Ken 3:08
So I used to think I was somewhat tech savvy for an old man. But is it something I do myself?

Craig 3:15
I knew you had that it was coming. I knew that you had that sound bite.

Matt 3:19 
I got it on ready all the time.

Craig 3:21
Well, if you can’t handle tabs on your browser, I think there’s a little bit of a clue there. But here’s the here’s the bottom line, here’s the recommendation. If you aren’t going to upgrade to Windows 10. And this is true, particularly with Windows, but really kind of any operating system. Here’s what I do, I don’t upgrade, what I do is I make sure I have two backups of my computer. I do a virgin install, I do completely wipe the computer, reformat the hard disk, and particularly with Windows. And then I get it installed, I get it all patched up up to date. And then I get the newest versions of the software that I had been running. And then I restore my files from backup. I don’t restore the whole backup. 

Ken 4:15
This is not going to happen. For me to do that is impossible. Just so you know.

Craig 4:24
So you need help then. We knew that. You need help with your computer then Ken. And yes, absolutely. And here’s why I do that. And here’s why I recommend people that have the ability to do it, do it. There are, and this is kind of a technical term, but there are turds all over your computer. Okay. The Ask Jeeves.

Ken 4:48  
Matt fixed that for me.

Matt 4:49 
I did. I got rid of it.

Craig 4:50
Yeah. Yeah, he got rid of it. And all these plugins remember when people were installing these bars on their browsers, right? Probably Ask Jeeves, yeah, don’t do that people including today. But there’s just all of these remnants from over the years that are there things are partially configured, the poorly configured. Your Windows machine crash right in the middle of updating the registry, all kinds of things happen there’s a power failure, which never happens in Maine. There’s a power failure when you’re doing something and that messed up stuff just enough so the computer works but some things get weird and get slow, etc, etc. So that’s why I recommend you just do a from scratch install, and then restore just your files. Now Apple is a little bit different. Apple can still have some of these types of problems. Apple doesn’t use a registry, it has a much better system. But like even with that, there are different types of problems with your computer. So when you do an upgrade on the apple, it takes some liberties and cleans things up on your behalf. But every two or three or four major releases of Apple operating system, I advise people to make sure you’ve got at least one good time machine backup, which is the built in backup software with Apple. And with Apple, you can have two or more copies of your backups. So have two USB drives, plug them in, put them both on time machine, leave it alone for flow, you can use the computer but leave the backup alone for a few days. It’ll backup everything. You’ll have two copies, and then do a from scratch install. And then with a time machine backup, you can just restore the user account information. So all of your files and things and and then just reload your programs to stuff. So it’s really good. It’s like a then we take it to your car into the dealer and get an oil change. You get your transmission fluid changed, the coolant changed, everything changed. It’s a good idea to do that with your computers and the way you do it is to good backups and then that thing out and start from scratch.

Matt 7:11
Craig Peterson tech guru joins us Wednesdays at this time to go over what’s happening in the world of technology. Craig I’m too curious to not ask about this one. The Pokemon thing. I mean, I so there’s some people who played as kids have some sort of brain scan, the brain scan is revealed that there’s a region their brain that essentially tells you that they played this game like explain this thing.

Craig 7:34 
Yeah. Yeah.

Matt 7:35  
And why is that? Like what happened?

Craig 7:36
Pokemon. Well, here’s what happened. This is just amazing. This is specifically that now any Pokemon gaming when you were young, now, you know, you had to do a fair amount of it, right? But any Pokemon gaming when you were younger, throws this little switch in your brain. But they found that particularly people who played Pokemon on Game Boys from the 1990s, are apparently kind of very susceptible for that. It’s kind of cool, because here’s what happened. They did an experiment, they did a brain study with some of these people who played Pokemon when they were kids. And they wanted to know, did it affect their brains? And you know how many years we’ve been talking about stuff like this right? Violent video games. Does that make you violent as an adult and stuff? Right. And I know, Matt, you’ve been saying no, it doesn’t, right?

Matt 8:35 
No, it does not.

Craig 8:36 
Yeah, exactly. So I thought. So they scan the participants brains. These were all self selected, and everything. You know how that goes. So this wasn’t like the best sort of study in the world, showing them images of all 150 original Pokemon. And they were showing them eight at a time and they mixed in other images, like animals faces, cars, words, hallways, other cartoons. And what they found in experienced players was a specific region of the brain responded more to Pokemon than to any other images. Absolutely amazing. This was the, you know, the occipital region, which is the rear back of the brain here. It’s the occipital temporal sulcus. I think it is. S-U-L-C-U-S. Some will know how to pronounce that. But it was absolutely amazing. And novices did not have this region respond in any different way to anything. So basically, Pokemon programmed your brain to selectively notice Pokemons more than anything else as part of a theory called extra sensory bias. And it suggests the size of the images and the types we’re looking at. And even in your peripheral vision, by the way, will make your brain respond. So fascinating. You know, what, what does that tell us? I don’t know.

Matt 10:07  
You got to catch them all. That’s what it tells you.

Craig 10:10
Yeah. Exactly. So you’ve been programmed Matt, and you just don’t realize it.

Matt 2:50
I’d like to make clear with the audience that I did not actually play that game growing up, but I am familiar with it.

Ken 10:20
We are talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru joins us Wednesdays at 7:38. Is Facebook a monopoly Mr. Peterson?

Matt 10:27
What does that have to do with milkshakes? I guess I didn’t follow that.

Craig 10:32
Wow, man, we could go on for hours. But here’s the bottom line, not just milkshakes, Matt, but hamburgers. And there’s a great example. This is an article that I have up on my website from Amgreatness. And Ray Kroc. Of course, you might remember the story of the start of McDonald’s, right? A couple of brothers had a hamburger stand. And it was amazing. And so Ray Kroc visited them trying to sell milkshake mixer, and was wondering why they needed four up milkshake mixer for such a small stand. The story evolved into McDonald’s and, and he took what they had done and license issues everything else in the legal side. So the point here is that with the way the patent laws are today, they go far beyond what most people think the Constitution requires. They now have patent laws that allow you to patent processes, business processes, for instance. And it’s gotten to the point where companies like Facebook, have patents on things that were obvious next steps, that even the patent law says aren’t supposed to be issued. But the patent office is so overrun their patent issuing patents for things that should never been patented. And so now you have companies like, like Facebook out there, and Microsoft, who have patents on things that may be shouldn’t have been issued, I don’t think most of them should have been issued. So they can have and they don’t have any competition. You know, we have people being that deep platform, we have conservative voices saying, Hey, listen, we’re, we’re not able to make any money anymore, because YouTube has cut us off, Facebook has cut us off, etc, etc. We should have five different alternatives out there for people to go to if Facebook or YouTube or someone else does something that kicks them off. And they say, Well, fine, I’m going to like conservative Facebook called XYZ book or whatever it might be. But we don’t. And a lot of the reason for that is the state of the patent laws. And I personally have said for a very long time, we’ve got to change them. With technology moving the way it is, we are hindering our progress in the technology world in a huge way, by allowing these corporations, big ones and small ones, to take an obvious idea patented, and then use the federal government to be there and for sure, for what’s now effectively a protected monopoly.

Matt 13:08
We are talking to Craig Peterson, our tech guru who joins us at this time every Wednesday to go over what’s happening in the world of technology. I guess the last question for us in the last couple minutes we have here Craig I’d love to ask you about about Google and deleting our data. This obviously sort of goes into privacy questions and everything we’ve been talking about recently in the online space. Will they be deleting my data? What do I need to know about this?

Craig 13:34
Yeah, you can manually go in right now and get a bunch of your data deleted manually. There’s some simple on off controls for location, history, web app activity. But you have to go into your Google account constantly to delete it and ask for it to be deleted. So Google has a new rollout coming within a month or so that is called auto delete controls. So you will be able to go in and I’ll let you guys know when this happens, right. So you can go and turn it on. But you’ll be able to go in and say, I want to place a limit. And you’ll have the amount of time Google you keep my history, my web, my app activity, my location, I want to put a limit on that. And you will get to choose between three months and 18 months, and the data will be automatically deleted on a rolling basis. So this is really good news. It comes in the wake of Facebook staring down at $2 billion fine, the largest in history, I think Google is kind of getting the impression that maybe we don’t want all of our data tracked. So this is a good thing. I’ll let you a little more when it happens. I’m also going to be putting info up on the top of my homepage today about this Intel vulnerability. It is huge. It’s the worst ever. Update update update people. Bottom line.

Ken 15:01
Craig Peterson, tech guru joins us every Wednesday at 7:38. This not being an exception. Thank you very much. And I will let you know how my upgrade of Windows 10 by myself does next week.

Craig 15:12
So you’re upgrading from XP. What are you doing?

Ken 15:15  
No. Windows 7 because I have a Mac it’s on my VM Fusion side of my Mac.

Craig 15:21
Okay, so a little hint here, before you do this, because you’re using Fusion, VMware Fusion, you can take a snapshot of your Windows machine before you upgrade it.

Ken 15:35 
How do I do that?

Craig 15:36 
Okay, you go into your fusion, and you click on the machine because you got a virtual machine, a Windows 7 machine, and then it has snapshot up in the menu at the top. And just go to snapshot and say take snapshot. And it’ll it’ll it’ll completely preserve absolutely everything in your Windows machine. And then you can go ahead and do the upgrade and everything goes.

Ken 15:58 
Nice. I’m going to do that right you now. Thank you.

Craig 16:01 
You can roll back. 

Ken 16:02  
All right. Thank you so much. There you go.

Matt 16:02  
All right, ladies and gentlemen, that is Craig Peterson. American hero and friend of the show. Joins us every Wednesday at this time to go over the world of technology.

Ken 16:10  
American hero.

Matt 16:12  
American hero. Coming up at 8:08. we have our eye on politics team and Jeremy Fisher