Compute This 6-22-2025

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Shrock Innovations presents the midwest number one independent computer repair
company with service centers and Lincoln, Omaha, Papillion, Des Moines,
and across the country via the Shrock desk. This is
Compute This. Good morning, folks, Welcome into Compute this.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
My name is Thora Schrock. I'm the owner of the
Shrock Innovations computer company. We've got four locations to help
you out when things are going sideways with your technology,
whether your computer's not working right, maybe you've got a
failed device you need some data recovery from. You can
find us in Lincoln, just south of fourteenth and Pine
Lake Road. In Omaha, We're at one hundred and sixty
eighth in Burke, across the street from the Village Point

(00:39):
shopping Center. In Papilion, Nebraska, we're just off of eighty
fourth and Highway three seventy and of course in Western Moine,
Iowa ninety four University Avenue over there, sorry, Western Moine
Iowa University Avenue. You can check us out there. Also,
we can help you out if you're remote, you're listening
from far flung locales. We welcome you to the program.
Welcome into Compute this. Appreciate you joining us whether you're

(01:02):
listening on terrestrial radio, listening on any of the podcasting
services out there, or perhaps even Facebook dot com, slash
shrock Innovations via schrockville. Here, we welcome you o board
and we can always help you out through the Shrockdesk,
our online remote support option at shrockinnovations dot com. You
just give us a call and we can get you
hooked up on the shrock Desk and get your technology

(01:23):
problems resolved for you. Four zero two five five eight
eleven ten is the number to join us on the program.
And if you are calling us from one of those
far flung distant locations, you can call in toll free
eight eight eight two five zero two zero nine to one.
That's eight eight eight two five zero two zero nine
to one. If you missed last week's show, It is

(01:44):
available up at shrockannovations dot com. You can go to
the website click on the radio show link there. We
also we had a caller a couple weeks ago tell
us it was not available in the in the mobile version,
like it wasn't in the Hamburger menu, and he was right,
it wasn't. I was like, oh okay, that was an
that was an oversight, So it is available in there now,
so if you're running on a mobile device, you'll be

(02:04):
able to pick it up there as well. But if
you missed the show last week, we reminded you to
delete your twenty three in me data before they sell
it to somebody, probably in China or something. You know
that's not good. We told you some of the competitive
advantages about Google Gemini, how it might be able to
compete with chat GPT and maybe even do things that
chat GPT can't do. We also told you how an

(02:25):
Atari twenty six hundred whooped up on chat GPT in
a game of chess, and I mean chat GPT was
making excuses like, well the graphics are so bad, I
couldn't tell the rooks from the bishops. You're like, yeah, yeah,
sure you couldn't, Sure you couldn't chat GPT. But it
was a fun story. So if you want to pick
any of that up, you can check that out. Shock
Innovations dot Com coming up on the show this week,

(02:48):
we got some kind of around the horn stuff coming
from the service centers. It was a weird week this week.
We had some crazy stuff happened. Also, do you remember
back in the day, Beck in my day, your aunt
virus protect you jew from crypto miners. Well, how you
have one particular anti virus is actually installing a crypto
minor on your computer for you. So of course you

(03:11):
can make money with your computers downtime, So we dive
into that one for you. Also, over thirty nine thousand
Apple M one equipped computers are now infected with malware.
And there's a lot of questions about what's going on here.
No one really knows. And so if you do have
an Apple computer, we have a story this week that
is going to hit home for you. Just another reason

(03:32):
why I know some people still believe, like from the
the window if you have a PC. This was like
the Windows Vista era where everybody was getting infected on
their their PCs with stuff and Vista wasn't doing a
great job. And there was the Mac and PC commercials
and it was Mac is like, oh PC, are you okay?
And PC sneezes chew, I've got a cold. Oh Mac, PC,

(03:54):
I'll take care of you. You know that kind of thing.
I don't get sick. I'm a Mac. And you know,
people had this belief that Apple computers just don't get viruses.
And that was true at the time because no one
really used Apple computers. But Vista was so terrible that
a lot of people switch to Apple, and so Apple
got such a huge influx of market share that suddenly

(04:17):
they were a target worth attacking. You see, you know,
if you're a bad guy, you're figuring out your opportunity
cost of the attack. You're not going after a target,
you know, you're not. You're going after Linux computers like
home Linux machines, because it's just not why would you
do that. It's not worth your time. Now, maybe web servers,
you know, that might be worth your time, just because
they're hooked up to more powerful Internet connections and things

(04:38):
like that, But why would you go after Linux computers
and nobody's using it? You know, well, and there's gonna
be that one gather.

Speaker 3 (04:44):
I have Linux on my computer. I'm going to Linux
to my Windows ten computer. Can keep going, you know, Okay,
you know, I hear you clucking. We got an email
yesterday in the service center from somebody who wanted us
to help them get their computer onto Linux.

Speaker 2 (04:58):
And that's the whole point. If you need help to
get your computer to Linux, you can't run Linux because
there is no one to help you do anything on Linux,
and it's just you have to know how to do it,
and so it requires a more in depth technological knowledge
than the average day to day consumer is comfortable brandishing about.
I don't even enjoy working within Linux. I'm learning more

(05:21):
about it because I need to for mining, but you know,
I don't enjoy it. I'd much rather have the ease
and comfort of Windows because it's what I know. I'm
not different than you in that way. It's just unfortunately
I have to do all the new things because you know,
you guys need me to know how to do them.
So we got to do that stuff. You know, it's
easier for me if I have a guy at the shop, like, hey,
you know Linux, you do that, then I don't have
to do it. But then if that guy's not available,

(05:43):
I don't know what to do, and that's that's not
a good place to be. So apples do get infections,
and we're going to talk about that coming up on
the program today. And also you probably have heard something
in the media this week, if you've heard any kind
of tech news about the sixteen billion bubb bub bub
billion passwords that were leaked this week. Well it's fake news.
We're gonna tell you what the real story is behind

(06:05):
it and why maybe you should be concerned, But you know,
I don't know that it's the urgent headline that sixteen
billion passwords leaked this week, which was carried in the
national media. The more I watch this Iran story this
week has just been insane because I'm watching YouTube broadcasters

(06:26):
who have family in Iran, so people of Persian descent,
like first and second generation Persians. You know, if you're Persian,
you live in Iran before it was an Islamic republic,
are telling us this is what's happening in Iran, and
then you turn on Fox News and they're telling you
something completely different. The other day it was like, you know,
Israel and Iran have been enemies for centuries. No, they've

(06:49):
been enemies since like nineteen seventy nine. The CIA did that,
Thanks Jimmy Carter, you know that, literally literally, the CIA
did that. Didn't mean to of course, course it was
an accident. I mean and legitimately it was. They didn't
intend to install a nasty, theocrat, anti American regime. They
just thought they'd be able to control it, and it

(07:09):
turns out that they couldn't. And you know, so now
here we are today. But the fake news that's out
there sometimes it's just mind blowing the stuff that's said
casually in the media and taking as truth when it's
completely not true. Some like sixteen billion passwords have been leaked. Well, yeah,

(07:31):
since the start of the year. If you add up
every password that's floating around on the Internet together and
include all duplicates, then yeah, it's about sixteen billion passwords
leaked on the Internet currently, not like a single event
that happened. Who has sixteen billion passwords? They've to ask
yourself that question? Yeah, me, I do, Yeah, who would

(07:54):
have sixteen billion active passwords? Like, it's a lot of words,
a lot of letters. Password one, password two, password three,
password three, exclamation mark? You know, who has sixteen billion
passwords to steal? It doesn't even make sense when you
think about it. But we're going to cover it for
you here on compute this and let you know what's

(08:14):
really going on. All right, for zero two, five, five, eight,
eleven ten number to join us on the program. This
week in the service centers, we had a lot of
interesting stuff going on, so I'm going to start off
with one that was in the data recovery lab. Actually,
and this is a this is a feel good story.
So des Moines customer brought an external hard drive in

(08:34):
for us and it it was damaged badly. I would
use the word incinerated in a house fire. So I
can only imagine if the if this external hard drive
was melted to the point I had to I had
to cut it apart and pull the plastic off the
drive with pliers to get the drive out of its

(08:55):
plastic shell. Like the plastic shell was wrinkled and shrunken,
just you know how melted plastic low. So it just
it was just melted. So I had to pull it
apart with pliers and take it off in chunks. It
was just a mess. I could only imagine everything else
in the house. So you know that this family is
going through it right now, right, and so I'm like, oh,
this is not going to be good like this. This

(09:16):
drive is probably probably toast, honestly, but we'll give it
the old college try. And so we get it out
of its protective shell, and you know, we get it
all cleaned, we get all the soot off the contacts,
We get everything all polished up and looking good so
that we can actually use the drive, and we get
it hooked up to the new PC three thousand pro
device that we have in the Omaha service center, and

(09:39):
we were able to get logical access to the drive.
And it wasn't operating properly, but we were able to
get some logical access, which was great because then the
PC three thousand pro had it that was all it needs.
It just needs It's like it just needs a toe
hold and then it can do its thing. And so
it went in and it got all the data back
off this drive. We're talking a complete recovery. So in
the middle of what is obviously some kind of massive

(10:02):
disaster for this family, we were able to get them
a lot of memories back that they thought would probably
be lost forever. And then here's the kick. If you
send this drive to drive savers, who is when the
Space Shuttle Columbia exploded in orbit and they're hard drives
crashed to Earth, drive savers recovered that data. They recovered

(10:25):
the data from the experiments that whatever data was on
those drives was recovered by drive savers. So that gives
you the idea like these guys know their stuff. They
are the krem Da La Creme, the best of the best,
and they do consumer work. Also, you send this incinerated
drive to drive savers, they're going to charge. They're going
to quote you between thirty nine hundred and seventy four

(10:48):
hundred dollars. And for some reason, every job we've ever
sent to them never comes under seven thousand dollars, no
matter what it is. So seven one thousand dollars to
recover the data. We did it at shruck for eight
hundred bucks. Why did we not charge more? Probably we

(11:10):
could have charged more. I mean, this was all the
family had left, right, we could have charged whatever. Maybe
insurance would have even paid for it, you know that
whole like, let's riot and steal everything because at least
they have insurance and insurance I'll pay for it. What
do you care? You know? Eight hundred bucks? Why did
we charge eight hundred dollars because that's what the rate
card on the shelf said. We needed to charge based
on the fact that the PC three thousand pro could

(11:31):
get a toe hold and I could do the recovery
in a mostly automated way. I didn't have to slave
over it. I didn't have to stand over it and
watch it. It ran for days, but it got the
data and it was automated. So it's not a four
hundred dollars basic recovery because those are like the really
easy ones, relatively easy from a technical perspective. This was

(11:51):
a little more moderate. Required some firmware repair and stuff.
So that was an eight hundred dollars job. If we
have to go in and actually replace parts, then it
gets a little more expensive, maybe sixteen hundred dollars still way,
and you know what we should do built We should
take a perfectly functioning hard drive and we should like
just unlinked the partition. I take the drive letter off

(12:11):
the partition so it works perfectly. All the data is there?
Any junior technician at shruck get this data back off
this drive. That's one way to do it. And then
we're going to send it to drive savers and see
what they quote us to recover the data from our
failing hard drive. That would be that would be hilarious
to watch them come back and tell us how bad
the drive is, how it's going to require platter cleaning

(12:34):
and the platters are damaged, and we don't know it's
going to be expensive. It could be seven thousand dollars.
And then when they get the data back and they
give us a quote and we're it's like, yeah, you know,
I don't think we need that data anyway. What data
should we put on the drive? Like we we probably
just cat pictures.

Speaker 4 (12:50):
Cat pictures and your favorite cookie recipe, your favorite cookie recipes.

Speaker 2 (12:55):
There we go, pictures of cookie monster and cat pictures.
That's all the the whole drive. The user folder will
the picture's folder will have like twenty seven gigabytes of
data and it will just be the same the same
cat picture over a photo is a picture of you
and grimm is from McDonald's, just because reasons. Desktop wallpaper
is Grimmits, the desktop wallpaper is. We are to This

(13:16):
is a test for drive savers to see how much
they will charge us for a drive that's actually perfectly
healthy and tell us it's bad. Oh my gosh, you know,
I I think we should do It's kind of slow
in the shops right now, I think we're gonna do that.
That's kind of fun. Uh, we shop competitors, why not
shop drives? Why not? All right? Four zero, two, five, five, eight,
eleven tens A number to join us on the program. Guys,

(13:37):
when we call you when you bring your computer in
for a maintenance checkup, we test your battery in your laptop.
If we call you back and tell you that your
battery is bad, that your battery needs to be replaced
or disconnected, literally, those are your choices. Your choice of
leave the battery in and let it kind of sort
of work is not a choice anymore like it's bad.

(14:00):
The reason that we tell you that is because of
what happened in the Des Moines service center this week.
I'm watching the security cameras Evans walking doing his doing it.
We call it doing laps. He's doing his laps on
the bench. We have a kind of a racetrack pattern.
There's an island in the middle of the room, and
there's benches on both walls, and you walk the bench
and you go from computer to computer. One tech can

(14:21):
run about twenty computers at a time while they're on
the phone or doing something else. Keep everything running, keep
it doing the next thing in the diagnostic checklist. And
there's a Microsoft Surface book on the desk or on
the bench, and he's going past it doing its thing.
He's on the phone. He has his back turn to it.
The thing spontaneously erupts in flame, just starts on fire.

(14:44):
It doesn't matter. It didn't have to be on our
bench today. It could have been in your lap. It
could have been on your desk at home. It could
have been in your drawer. It could have been in
your laptop bag and your backpack. But it was going
to catch on fire today. Today was the day. And
you know, you don't think about batteries in computers storing
energy like that. Energy can be converted into a thermal

(15:07):
event like a fire, but it's energy. And so when
something goes wrong in the battery, we have pictures up?
Do we have pictures of this up on Facebook? At
It might be on my personal Facebook page. I think
I have it scheduled to go up, so sometimes I
schedule posts out a head. So yeah, I don't see
it yet. The melted hard drive from the data recovery
lab is up there, though, and so we're this is

(15:27):
the pictures. We're gonna post the pictures of this at
Facebook dot com slash Shrock Innovations. But I mean, we
had to take it out. The guy Evan turns around,
He's like, what's that smell? He turns around. Oh god,
he grabs the thing and he's like, he's like a
chef carrying a you know, crem brew let out the
back door. You know, it's on fire. So he gets
the fire extinguisher up. I mean, just the thing looks

(15:51):
I mean, was it necessary? But I guess it's a
lithium fire. So yeah, I mean, you try to put
a lithium fire out. Hopefully the battery didn't have a
full charge. So he gets it put out, and you know,
we'll be able to get the data from the computer.
I believe, but yeah, it just goes to show you.
The guy the customer brought the computer in because the
screen was delaminating. It was kind of like the coding
was coming off the screen. Wanted us to quote him

(16:14):
a screen replacement so he'd have a nice, pretty screen again.
And he had no idea his battery was even in
a failure state. We didn't even get to the point
where we could test the battery. We were still going
through the diagnostic checkpoints on everything else, and it just
caught on fire. So if we tell you that your
battery is bad, please please please listen. This doesn't happen
to everybody This happens very rarely, honestly, but it does happen,

(16:38):
and it would sure be a shame if that happened
to you. And the final funny thing that we had
in the service ender of this week, I had to
recover a ZIP disc in the data recovery lab, a
one hundred megabyte zip disc. Now, those of you who
weren't around in the nineteen nineties don't even know what
a zip disc is, but you know, we had floppy
discs that said that there were one point for megabyte.

(16:58):
So now I think you're used to your life existing
in one point four megabytes of space, and then suddenly
somebody gives you this really fat floppy disc looking thing
called a zip disc that holds one hundred floppy discs,
and you're like, it was like the thumb drive of
its day. Students went to school, You'll keep your projects
on your zip disc, you know whatever. So this was
a Mac formatted zip disc and the customer brought in

(17:22):
there's zip drive and everything. It was this he brought
in the zip It was a serial zip drive. So
you know, you remember the the old print, not your
USB printers, but what came before USB printers. The LPT printers.
What came before those were serial printers. So we're talking
like some solid late eighties early nineties tech here, and

(17:44):
oh my gosh, so obviously I couldn't use his drive.
And I'm like, you know, I think I have a
USB zip disc somewhere in my drawer of like stuff
that I should probably throw away. My wife' said you're
a hoard or take it to the shop if you're
going to keep it. So take these things to the
shop and I stick them in a drawer. So I'm
digging through a drawer and sure enough, here it is
my purple USB ZIP two fifty drive. Because they made

(18:04):
a two fifty zip disk too, it was backward compatible,
and so we fire it up, and of course the
magnetic surface on the zip disc was degraded, so the
data wasn't reliably coming off the disc, and so then
we used another application to go in and get the
data off the disc and we recover it, and then
we was like, what did we have here? The customer
still hasn't called us back for this recovery, and we're

(18:25):
not really sure. Well I know exactly why, because there's
nothing on this disc that's that valuable Wolfenstein three D
data files. Now, if you ever played Wolfenstein three D
and you had a sick game going, why don't you
get past those Nazis and the dogs, Like the dogs
would come at you. If you played Wolfenstein three D
as a kid or even as an adult, I mean

(18:46):
it was a pretty sick game for the era. It
was all it was like Duke Nukem. It was like
it was. It was the three D first person shooter game.
It was more of a doom guy. Yeah, I mean
it was. It was beautiful, but yeah, uh and the
dogs would bark and they come at you. Oh it's terrible.
Those Nazi dogs are awful and you have man, No,
you're just Wolfenstein Escape from Castle Wolfenstein three D. Yeah,

(19:09):
So the data files from his saved games, I'm not
sure that he's gonna play those, but we've got him.
We were able to recover him. So it was a
fun exercise in working with old Tech. Four zero two, five, five,
eight eleven ten. You're gonna take our first break of
the program. Guys when we come back. You remember when
your antivirus was supposed to protect you from crypto miners. Now,

(19:30):
if you have one particular antivirus product. Every single install
is installing a crypto minor on your computer for your convenience.
Isn't that special. We're going to tell you who's mining
on your computer if you have this antivirus coming up
next on compute this.

Speaker 5 (19:46):
Everyone has experienced some form of data loss or no
someone who has. It's unfortunate, but sometimes the technology we
rely on simply fails. And the last question you want
to hear at that time is you have a backup
right hard drive, memory card, backup drive or flash drive fails,
you turn to the data recovery experts at Shrock Innovations

(20:07):
to get those pictures, songs, and memories back. You know,
not all data recovery companies are the same. Having the
right tools and knowledge to get the job done right
on the first attempt makes all the difference between a
successful recovery and the permanent loss of your important data.
Sometimes you only get one.

Speaker 6 (20:24):
Shot at a successful recovery.

Speaker 5 (20:26):
That's why Shrock has invested in top of the line
recovery imagers, a Class one hundred clean environment, over ten
thousand dollar components, and a staff of recovery engineers that
are the best in the business. Shrock has a ninety
six percent recovery rate getting data back from failed devices.

Speaker 6 (20:43):
When the unthinkable happens.

Speaker 5 (20:44):
And you need your data back, turn to the experts
at Shrock Innovations for professional and affordable data recovery services.

Speaker 4 (20:52):
If you can dream it, Shock Interactives website developers can
make it happen. Refresh your website, automate sales and marketing,
and grow your business Today was shock Interactive.

Speaker 5 (21:02):
Laptops are subjected to some of the most stressful computing
situations imaginable. They get dropped, stepped on, flap shut, and
pushed until the battery dies. Sometimes your laptop works hard
for you, so when it has a problem, take it
to the laptop experts at Shrock Innovations. SHROC has four
convenience service centers the Nebraska and Iowa with more than

(21:23):
one hundred total bench spots to get your technology up
and running again. Shrock has the largest supply of replacement
components in stock, and we fix more laptops than any
other nearby repair center. Why wait weeks to get your
computer fixed when Shrock can diagnose the problem, provide you
with a friendly and accurate estimate, and fix it usually
in two days.

Speaker 6 (21:43):
Or less.

Speaker 5 (21:43):
Remember, if you have never been into our service centers before,
new customers get their first.

Speaker 6 (21:48):
Hour of labor free.

Speaker 5 (21:49):
So the next time your laptop screen gets cracked, the
keys pop off your keyboard, or your two year old
decides a glass of milk is exactly what your laptop
needs to cool off, Take it to sh and let
your local laptop repair experts get it back in top
shape again.

Speaker 2 (22:10):
All righty folks, welcome back in to compute this. Going
through the comments here at facebook dot com, slash shock
Innovation Zdog asks what's the best way to save pictures
long term from an iPhone? I hate paying for their
extra storage and you know you're not the only one
that feels that way. There is a way to do it. Basically,
there's an app that you can use to save those apps,

(22:30):
those photos, those applicate if you wanted to say applications.
There is an app that allows you to save what
you want to get from your iPhone onto your PC.
That app is basically something you install from the Windows Store.
It's the Apple Devices app. We used to use iTunes
to do this back in the day, but they've retired iTunes.

(22:52):
That's gone now. Now it's the Apple Devices app that
you get from the Microsoft Store, which will require you
to have a Microsoft account by the way, which some
of you don't want to do, but you have to
do that. If you want an app from the store,
you connect your phone to the computer, you open on
the app, you unlock your phone, and then you can
take the pictures from your phone and download them directly

(23:13):
into your computer. It's a little bit easier on a Mac,
you know. For that you take a USB cord and
you hook it up to your Mac and then it
pops up and you can get the pictures out because
the two are made to work together. So there you go,
z Dog. That's how you get it done for zero two, five, five,
eight eleven ten. Michael, Welcome to the program. How can
I help you on compute this today?

Speaker 7 (23:33):
Yeah, good morning morning. Sofit was bought by Google, I
don't know within the last year, and here about a
month or so ago, I got an email from Google saying, well,
if you don't open a Google account, all your data
is going to be lost. And so I'm wondering is

(23:54):
there a risk to opening or a benefit to opening
your Google account? And or do I have to go
out and buy a different fitness tracker to avoid doing that.

Speaker 2 (24:06):
Gotcha, well, well, Fitbit is very George w. Bush. You know,
it's it's it's old tech for sure. There are other
options out there that do all kinds of stuff like
the Apple Watch or the you know, any of the
Samsung watches will do that thing they or a rings
will do that. The challenge here, though, is all any device,
any fitness tracker, is going to require you to have

(24:27):
some kind of an account to store your data in
the cloud. And so if you get an Android device,
guess where you're gonna store that? In a Google account,
if you get a or in my case of Samsung
account because I have a Samsung device. Uh, if you
get a an Apple an iPhone, you're gonna store it
in your Apple account if you Yeah, so getting a

(24:48):
getting a Google account, there is no inherent risk in
having a Google account. It gives you access to Gmail,
It gives you access to Google Docs, Google drives, some
you know, some cloud storage options and things like that.
It can come in really handy from time to time.
It also acts as a repository for all data that
you're sharing with Google. And like we talked about last week,
one of the big advantages in the upcoming AI revolution

(25:11):
that we're going to see is, you know, everyone knows
what chat GPT can do, but Gemini can do everything
Chat gp Gemini is Google's AI can do everything that
chat GPT can do, except it has access to all
of your data, and it can send an email for you,
and it can put something on your Google calendar, and
it can create a document and save it in your
Google Drive. Chat GPT can't do any of those things

(25:34):
for you.

Speaker 8 (25:35):
OK.

Speaker 2 (25:36):
So the fact that Google has a whole ecosystem of
apps put together number one makes it a just a
massive surveillance threat to your privacy, honestly. But on the
other hand, it can make your life really easy. I
have Ways in my car. Ford wants to charge me
four hundred and ninety five dollars a year for navigation
in my dashboard. Or I can just get in my

(25:57):
car and have Ways on my phone and it's a
Google app up and it pops up on my dashboard
and says where do you want to go? Even tells
me where the police are at, which is handy and
a Mustang, so you know it's you know, it pops
up on the screen.

Speaker 7 (26:11):
You know I have a Gmail account.

Speaker 2 (26:12):
Now, oh, then you already have a Google account. It's
the same thing, is it really? Yeah, so you just
use your Gmail log in and it'll log you right
into the Google account.

Speaker 7 (26:22):
Okay, so maybe my question is moot, I already have
what I don't think I want.

Speaker 2 (26:26):
You already compromise. You're already on the dark side, Michael.

Speaker 7 (26:29):
You just didn't know it exactly right. So I don't
have to go out and buy an Apple Watch even
though you have an.

Speaker 2 (26:34):
I phone unless you were looking for a reason.

Speaker 7 (26:37):
Yeah, yeah, okay, Well that's great. It's pretty information.

Speaker 2 (26:42):
Hey, no sweat, Michael. Thank you for the call. I
appreciate you joining us on compute this today. Have a
great afternoon. Four zero two, five, five, eight eleven ten.
It's that easy, and we've got Michael in the drawing
for a twenty five dollars Shock Innovations gift certificate. I'm
going to save the story for the antivirus for the
next segment because it takes a little bit of time
to go through. But one thing I will really quick here.
Since we are we're talking a little bit about Apple products,

(27:03):
there's an infection going around called silver Sparrow Silver Sparrow
has infected thirty nine thousand Apple M one Max And
the reason that that is important is the M one
chip up to this point has been relatively impervious to viruses.
There are two infections, two known infections that impact that processor.

(27:25):
So if you have an M series processor, Mac, yes
you need antivirus, but it's to protect you from two
infections out there, and one of them is silver Sparrow.
Here's the trick. Nobody knows how silver Sparrow is spreading.
No researcher understands how it's getting on your computer. Is
an AD that's popping up on your screen? Is it
something you're installing? Is it a companion piece of software?

(27:46):
Nobody knows where it's coming from. More concerning, nobody knows
what it does. So it appears to just sit there
and not do anything, waiting for a command from you know,
command central. So is it dead malware? Did the command
and control servers get nuked or something? You know? What
was the command and control center in Fardau? I don't know,

(28:07):
you know, So maybe it's gone now I don't know,
Or maybe this malware is so good it knows it's
being watched by a malware researcher, so it just doesn't
do anything they don't know. So this is something to
be aware of. Max get viruses. Apple products need protection,
not just Apple Max, not just computers. But your iPhone

(28:29):
needs it, your iPad needs it, your Android tablet needs it,
your Android phone needs protection too. So a lot of
I mean when you have the FBI coming out saying
make sure you reboot your phone once a day, because
malware can get resident in the memory of the phone
pretty easily. Rebooting fixes it. Sure, and we all reboot
our phones every day, right right. I rebooted mine three

(28:53):
days ago, I think, not because I was worried about viruses,
but because my headphones wouldn't pair with the phone, so
I rebooted it. That was more important. See, I have
sofos on my phone. I know I'm okay. So let
us put sofos on your mac. Let us put sofos
on your mobile devices. Will make sure they stay safe
so that you don't get infected with stuff like silver

(29:13):
sparrow for zero two, five, five, eight, eleven ten. Now,
when we come back from the break, guys, I'm going
to tell you a story about an antivirus software that everyone.
When I tell you who it is, everybody knows who
this is and would I would almost guarantee you that
every person listening has given this company a buck at
some point in their life. It's that popular of antivirus software,

(29:35):
and they're installing cryptomners on your computer by default. It's
a feature, not a bug, not an infection. The anti
virus company is installing a cryptomnor on your computer so
that you can make extra money with your computers extra
CPU cycles. Doesn't that sound great? You could earn as

(29:56):
much as two hundred and fifty bucks a year off
your comput downtime. Huh about time these machines start paying
for themselves. Right, Well, we're going to give you the details.
It's not as rosy as you might think. Coming up
next on compute this.

Speaker 1 (30:10):
Remember the good old days when virus detection worked like
where's Waldo? Spot the virus and the striped shirt and
you win. Today's infections are changing hourly to avoid detection
and use social engineering to trick you into making mistakes.
Using yesterday's security to defend against today's threats is like
using leeches to stop an infection. It just doesn't work.

(30:33):
We recommend Sophos intercept x anti virus backed by Shrocks
Virus free guarantee. SOFOS uses the power of AI to
detect the patterns of a virus attack and responds with
Shock's custom actions that stop it fast. With sofos on
your PC, Mac, Android, or iOS device, you get the
state of the art protection you need to defend against

(30:55):
the most advanced attacks out there. In fact, if your
device gets a virus while runs antivirus, Shock will remove
it for free, guaranteed it hasn't happened yet and we
intend to keep it that way. Ditch your dad's anti
virus and keep your device, data and identities safe with
Sofos and Shrock Innovations.

Speaker 4 (31:15):
Drive Advisor is a free program from Shock Innovations that
monitors your hard drives health and tells you if it's
going bad. Download it for free at driveadvisor dot com.

Speaker 5 (31:24):
You know your computer needs modern anti virus, and you
know using a VPN helps protect your identity online, But
did you know that all of that protection could be
useless if you're running outdated programs. We all run common
free software like Adobe Reader, Dropbox, Firefox.

Speaker 6 (31:40):
And Chrome every day.

Speaker 5 (31:41):
There are critical security updates for these common programs that
don't get automatically installed for up to two weeks. That's
an eternity in today's world. That's why Shrock created Secure Updata.
Secure updater checks for and installs these critical updates every
eight hours, boosting your antivirus by closing off attack vectors
before they can be used to penetrate your computer. Go

(32:03):
to secure updater dot com and try it for free.
We are so confident in our product we don't even
ask for a credit card to start the trial. Go
to secure updater dot com today and start your fourteen
day trial and enjoy having the peace of mind that
your software is being updated quickly and safely. You will
be shocked at the number of programs that are out

(32:23):
of date on your PC.

Speaker 6 (32:25):
Right now, get.

Speaker 5 (32:25):
Your fourteen day free trial at secure updater dot com.

Speaker 2 (32:34):
All right, folks, welcome back in to compute this. I
want to remind everybody to stay tuned for the Aftershock
coming up here after the program is over at Facebook
dot com slash Shock Innovations. The Aftershock is the show
that gets all the stuff that wants to leak out
of my head into compute this but isn't really computer related,
so we throw it all over there. Sometimes there's interesting,
sometimes things happen in the world, you know, and sometimes

(32:56):
there's things going on in the media tells you one
thing and it's not true. Remember yesterday when it was
like we dropped six bunker buster bombs according to Catherine Herriage. Well,
now the briefing, the bomb damage assessment briefing is out,
and how many bunker busters did they drop? Like fourteen
fourteen bunker buster bombs, So yeah, it was a little
more than six, and ninety cruise missiles. Was actually seventy

(33:19):
five precision guided munitions. So just take the media's stuff
with a grain of salt, because they don't all they
don't usually know, and they they think they know and
they don't. And so there's a whole bunch of that
kind of stuff that we're going to talk about during
the Aftershock today because things happening in Iran are not
what they seem right now. Four zero, two, five, five, eight,
eleven tens number to join us on the program. So

(33:41):
some of you, most of you, in fact most Shock
customers at some point have spent money on a Norton
product for their computer, whether that is Norton anavirus, Norton
three sixty, the Norton Utilities Norton, what was it called
the Clean System System clean cisclean. I mean there was
there was all kinds of Norton products going way back

(34:03):
to the nineties. The Peter, his name was Peter Norton,
was the guy that started the Norton antivirus company. And
so it's been sold and resold and resold and recently
merged with LifeLock because you know, LifeLock couldn't really lock
your life. They could just let you know when your
life was going unraveled. Thanks, I already knew because I
couldn't get a mortgage or credit or anything because someone

(34:23):
stole my identity. But you know, we'll give you up
to forty hours of help fixing It. Won't guarantee that
it's going to fix anything, but we'll help you for
forty hours go through efforts to fix things. And then
there's Norton, who is really the antivirus company. Their technology
was really good, except then they decided to sell their

(34:44):
really good technology to Broadcom because that was the stuff
that the corporation's got. The Norton the semantic end point
that's what we used to sell at Shock. That's what
the corporation's got. And so they sold that to Broadcom
during the pandemic, and then they said, well, we need
to have something for consumers. What do we have in
the back of the closet here? Rummage, rummage, rummage. Oh hey, look,

(35:04):
here's this Norton three sixty garbage that we brought that
we made when George W. Bush was president. Let's bring
that forward again, make a new engine for it. It'll
be a good definition based antivirus product. And if you've
heard this program for long, you know that definition based
antivirus is so ancient that it's unusable anymore. It doesn't work.

(35:25):
So you've got an antivirus product product that it's better
than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick,
but really doesn't work as well against AI threats, as
you know, sofos for example. And then you've got LifeLock,
a company that can't lock your life. Really, they got
sued for not being able to do it. Had to
put a disclaimer saying that they can't. This whole product's
about locking your life, but we can't actually lock your life.

(35:48):
Some restrictions apply. See store for details, you know, that
kind of thing. So those two companies got together and
had a baby called Norton LifeLock, and one of the
somebody at Norton LifeLock had the bright idea, you know,
we spend a lot of time removing crypto miners from
people's computers. These these kind of bad guys will install
a program on your computer to use your computer's processor,

(36:11):
graphics card, and your power that you pay for to
mine for cryptocurrency. And each computer minds a very small
amount of cryptocurrency about sixty six cents a day. If
you have a three thousand series graphics card, you could
do maybe sixty six cents of crypto a day if
you were really pushing it, and usually not that much,

(36:32):
but sixty six cents a day. So bad guys if
they can, if they can compromise hundreds of thousands of
computers at you know, a quarter twenty five cents a day,
they can bring up a lot of crypto doing that. Right,
So Norton says, you know, what if, what if just
saying here, we have a lot of installations across a

(36:53):
lot of computers out there. We charge is up to
four hundred dollars a year for antivirus, because every year
Norton charges you more then you paid the previous year.
It's just on auto renews, so you don't notice, and
then you wonder, after four or five years, was I
always paying four hundred dollars a year for this? Crazy? Right?
Just check you don't believe me. Check, Go take a
look at your bank statement for the last time you
paid for Norton. To a search Norton and you'll find it.

(37:15):
And when you when you find it, you'll be like,
oh my gosh, how much am I paying for this?
Why is it? Three hundred dollars a year? Two hundred
dollars a year? That's ridiculous. Well, on top of all that,
Norton is installing a crypto miner on every computer that
you install Norton LifeLock on the end crypt Norton crypt
crypt is a crypto mining application. Now it's not turned

(37:38):
on by default, so it's not it's a malware guy.
A bad guy would turn it on by default and
just mine and keep all the crypto for himself. What
Norton does is push NAG windows up to pop up
on your screen to say you could be making money
with your computers. Downtime click here to learn more. Well,
that sounds good, right, I want to make money with

(37:58):
my computers downtime. So I click on that link and
it opens up the Norton application window and there's a
little slider you can turn it on. You can actually
turn on, you know, use my computers downtime to make
me money by mining for crypto. Now, if you had
a holiday special grade computer equipped with a graphics card

(38:19):
that was at least a three thousand series, as we said,
you could mine about sixty six cents a day. Most
of you don't have that, though, so most of you
are going to have an endeavor or maybe a boundless
you're going to be mining ten cents eight cents a
day something like that. Let's just use the sixty six
cent per day example, because that's what the Verge did.
They did a test and they said, okay, this computer

(38:41):
mined sixty six cents worth of crypto. They measured how
much power it used during off peak hours, so the
off peak power rate, it used sixty six cents worth
of power. So it literally you need no money. You
spent sixty six cents for power, you got sixty six cents.
It's worth of crypto, except Norton takes a fifteen percent

(39:05):
cut off the top, so you didn't get sixty six cents,
you got fifteen percent less. And then, of course Norton
doesn't pay out your crypto earnings until you hit a
certain threshold. You have to get a certain amount of
money before you get a payout. So if you turn
it on and let it run for a few weeks
and then you go back and look again and you're like, oh,
that was a waste of time and money. Now it's like, well,

(39:26):
do I turn it off because I'm never going to
get a payout I'm never gonna get the crypto that
it mined unless it gets to a minimum payout threshold.
So maybe I just let it run for a little
while longer. So you let it run, and it's just
beating the tar out of your computer. It's wearing out
your graphics card, it's wearing out your processor, it's causing
all kinds of thermal damage to your computer. It just
it's not worth it. Modern computers are not designed to

(39:49):
mind crypto anymore. They're just not. That's why people buy
crypto or build crypto mining rigs, disposable computers that you're
only going to use for mining crypto that you're gonna
beat to death until it dies, and then you're going
to sell the parts on eBay to the next guy.
You know. That's that's what you do if you're a cryptomnor.
So you don't you don't do that with your home

(40:09):
computer or your gaming computer. It's not smart to do that.
So Norton is going to have you do this sixty
six cents a day. They take fifteen percent off the top,
They make you keep minding to you hit a minimum
payment threshold, and then at the end of the day
you get your payout and they say that you can
you can make up to two hundred, two hundred and

(40:29):
fifty bucks a year doing this, right, So it seems
like a good deal. So Norton believes they're going to
charge you four hundred dollars a year potentially for their
anti virus product with LifeLock, and they think you're also
dumb enough to spend an extra two hundred dollars a
year on power so that you can mine one hundred

(40:50):
and seventy dollars worth of cryptocurrency that then you have
to you can only send to coinbase. You can't withdraw
it to your private wallet or send it to yourself
and hold it in a personal wallet. You have to
send it to Coinbase. If you've ever done business with coinbase,
getting it into Coinbase is easy. Doing anything with it
on Coinbase is expensive. You're going to lose a ton

(41:11):
of fees and your one seventy is going to become
one fifty is going to become one forty, and you're
taking Now, if bitcoin goes to one point five million,
you'll be really happy that you mind that two hundred
dollars worth a crypto on your your holiday special computer
using your Norton product. My whole point here, guy, here, guys,
my entire point to this is this is not what

(41:31):
an anti virus company is meant to do. And this
is what Norton's been doing for years. They're pushing password managers. Yeah,
we have antivirus product and LifeLock product, and you know
all these different things, a backup utility and now a
crypto mining utility. It's not what you want them to

(41:51):
be focused on. You want them to be focused on
keeping your computer safe. That's why we recommend sofos because
it keeps your computer safe. That's all it does. It
doesn't mind for crypto, it doesn't remember your passwords, It
doesn't do anything aside from keeping your computer safe, which
is what you're paying for it to do. And you
know it's great because the renewal a lot. It's only
about eighty bucks a year, so it's a lot cheaper

(42:13):
than Norton in the long run as well for zero two, five, five, eight,
eleven ten, Chuck, Welcome to the program. How can I
help you on compute this today? Good morning morning.

Speaker 8 (42:22):
I have a question of I have a question about
duplicate finders or cleaners. Yeah, I don't know a good one.
And I got, you know, like everybody else, several pictures,
files and stuff that I'd like to find if there's
duplicates and get rid of them.

Speaker 2 (42:36):
Yeah. In fact, it was kind of funny because I've
got an account with Puriform and so they make like
ce cleaner and stuff like that, and so they sent
me once in a while they send out these like
these offers and they're like thanks for being like a customer.
And they sent me an email and it said here's
a bunch of free software you can download. I don't
know how they made money off this, but it was
all really free for sure. One of those things was

(42:57):
a duplicate finder, and I spent a ton of times
sorting through my pictures on my computers, like sorting them
into file folders, like these are pictures of my son
and these are pictures of my daughter. And then the
computer was like, you already have this picture? Do you
want to override it? Yes? Yes, yes. So I was
eliminating duplicates as I was going, but it was taking forever.
So I thought a duplicate finder would be really great.
So I installed this free one and activated it and

(43:20):
ran it on my computer, and it found like tons
of duplicate files. But then it got down to like, okay,
now it's time to delete those files. And I just
got super nervous because we're talking about like, okay, so
how do I know these files are identical? Well that
they're the same size, they're the same name, they have

(43:40):
the same hash. They are definitely duplicate files, and I
and it wants to delete the files from my pictures folder. Well,
where's the other file at that it's not in the
pictures folder. Why wouldn't you want to delete the ones
that aren't in the folders? They're supposed to be in, like,
rather than delete the ones from the pictures folder, and
then I'll never be able to find the file where
wherever it is on my could be in a temporary

(44:01):
folder somewhere that I might empty it with sea cleaner
and clean up my computer and lose it forever. And
so I just I got really nervous. I was ready
to click the delete button, and I stopped because I'm like,
I don't know, I think I'm going to delete something
that's important here. So I didn't want to lose a
bunch of pictures of my family, So I just stopped
and said, I'll sort of manually. So I hear what

(44:21):
you're saying. Duplicate files are a problem. And you know,
my wife said my storting method was stupid. I needed
to sort them by dates, not by people, because you know,
sorting it by people sounds really great. Here's a picture
of my son, here's a picture of my daughter. What
do you do when there's a picture of both of
them in the same picture? Yeah, oh snap, what happens
if there's a picture of your wife and your kids

(44:43):
in the same picture? Who is that I created a
folder called family? Well, then well, here's a picture of
a nephew and here's a picture of a niece. Do
they get their own folder or do they get a
family folder? I don't understand, man, I'm making up rules
as I go. This is getting kind of complicated. But
I don't know. I just found that the duplicate they exist.
You can find them all over the internet. They're not

(45:05):
hard programs to make, but they are so friggin scary
to use. So before you do it, have a full
backup of your computer, which sounds silly, before you delete
those duplicate files, make sure you back them up, you know,
but trust me, you might be thankful that you did,
especially if you delete all the duplicates. Then you go

(45:25):
to your pictures folder and half your photos are gone,
and you're like, wait a minute, where are my photos?
Then are they in the documents folder? Are they in
the in the in the videos folder?

Speaker 4 (45:34):
Like?

Speaker 2 (45:34):
Where were these photos that you found? Duplicates? And then
I could go through and tell it which one I
wanted to keep, But why can't I tell it to
keep everything that's in the pictures folder? Because I'm there
was like thirty nine thousand duplicate files. I'm like I'm
not going to like this thirty nine thousand times. That'd
be the same as doing it manually. So I went

(45:55):
back to the manual method myself. So, Chuck, they exist.
They're out there. Do a Google search. You'll find a
million of them. There's free ones, there's paid ones. They're
all just as scary though.

Speaker 8 (46:07):
Okay, well, I have one more question if I could ask, sure,
have you thought about having like a multiple device plan
for Sofos, like a family plan or because we have
we both have laptops, we both have cell phones, and
by the time you add up eighty dollars, eighty dollars,
eighty dollars, it's a bunch of money.

Speaker 2 (46:26):
It does it does add up. Now, the challenge that
we have with this is that Sofos makes a home
product and that licenses up to five devices. The Sofos
home product is not the same thing as the sofas
that we offer at Shrock. So the sofas that we
offer at Shrock is enterprise grade and it's designed to

(46:46):
create like a protection bubble for each computer that's specific
to that device. So you can't spread that same bubble
across multiple devices because they're different devices. The problem is
that we get charged per endpoint. And so if we
if we were going to say create a you know,
a lot of people think, well thor you must be
raking it in you guys. I think we'll make twenty
bucks per year per subscriber. I mean, that's all we're

(47:08):
making on sofos SO.

Speaker 8 (47:10):
We don't have a ton' senior mustang.

Speaker 2 (47:12):
Yeah, that's what happens. We have fourteen thousand subscribers. Now.
The you know, we make about twenty bucks per month
per subscriber, or excuse me, twenty dollars per year per
subscriber on sofos SO. Of the eighty dollars, you know,
twenty of it's going to shock for overhead people, you know,
stuff like that. The rest of it literally goes to
sofos SO. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of meat on

(47:33):
the bone there for us to do a five you know,
device discounted plan for a family plan or something like that.
If we could, we certainly would, but it wouldn't be
the same protection unfortunately. Thanks for the call, Chuck, I
really appreciate you joining us on the program today, and
we got you in the drawing there as well for
that twenty five dollars. Shock Innovations gift certificate for zero, two, five, five, eight,
eleven ten. Got to take a quick break here, final

(47:54):
break of the program. Guys, when we come back, you
probably heard about sixteen billion passwords being leaked on the
inn last week. Well, before you get too excited about it,
it's fake. We're going to tell you what the story
was about, what the real news is, and what you
need to do to protect yourself. Coming up next on
compute this.

Speaker 5 (48:12):
There are enough unused computers in storage to give every man, woman,
and child in the US an old, outdated and useless
computer system. Obsolete tablets and smartphones are nearly as bad.
Most people know not to throw them into the landfill
where they leak and contaminate, but it's hard to find
a place to safely recycle electronics. That's why Shrock Innovations

(48:33):
offers free recycling for computers, laptops, phones, tablets, cords, and accessories.
In fact, only monitors and printers have a small recycling fee.
Everything else is free. More importantly, Shock will securely delete
any data from your devices and hard drives before they
are sent to a certified recycling partner, who will then
repeat the wiping process just to be saved. When you

(48:55):
recycle your old technology at Shrock, you know your identity
and privacy are and your equipment is being actually recycled
by a certified recycling partner. Shock is proud to recycle
more e wasys than we produce annually, making a positive
difference to our economy and ecology. Do your part by
dropping your old gear at any Shock service center and

(49:16):
be part of the area's largest and most popular technology
recycling program with Shrock Innovations.

Speaker 4 (49:23):
Shock Innovations Data Recovery Labs saves the data the other
guys can't. The next time your hard drive, camera card,
or flash drive fails, let Shrock get your data back.

Speaker 5 (49:33):
You would probably rather drink the water at Camp La
June than get another call about the desperate need to
renew your cars expiring warranty.

Speaker 6 (49:41):
Who actually responds to those calls.

Speaker 5 (49:43):
Everyone wants to play the warranty game where you pay
money now just in case you need service later that
everyone hopes you won't need or use. It's such a waste.
It's no different with computers. Major manufacturers warranties have more
subscript crosses than a Sunday morning church service.

Speaker 6 (50:00):
Batteries are exempt.

Speaker 5 (50:01):
Hard drives must be completely dead and forget about anything
that they can remotely.

Speaker 6 (50:06):
Claim us physical damage.

Speaker 5 (50:07):
That's why Shrock warranties are different. When you purchase a
modular PC or a solid state laptop and extend your warranty,
we offer a no risk money back guarantee.

Speaker 6 (50:17):
If you need the warranty, you.

Speaker 5 (50:18):
Will be thrilled to have it if you don't use it,
and we refund your money automatically every time.

Speaker 6 (50:23):
That's right.

Speaker 5 (50:24):
We are so confident in the quality of our products
that our extended warranties are refundable. Many Shock customers use
their refunds to purchase another warranty or pocket the savings
and move on. We all know you'll need it to
cover that expiring car warranty anyway. Shocks refundable extended warranties
just another way. The Shrock Innovations Computer Company makes your

(50:45):
computer work for you.

Speaker 2 (50:51):
All righty guys, final segment of the program. Thanks for
sticking with us today and compute this. The Shrock Innovation's
computer company has been voted Best of Omaha, Best of
Lincoln Now, Best of West as well Best of Sarpi County.
You know it's getting to be a habit. I want
to remind everybody Best of Omaha is coming up next
month here. We're going to be talking about that on
future programs here as well, and I'll have a question

(51:13):
about this on the Aftershock. We usually do like a
giveaway to encourage you to participate in the Best of Obaha.
We don't know who you vote for, but we put
a computer up and say go vote. Just tell us
that you voted. The hope is you would vote for us,
but you know, tell us that you voted, and then
we'll go ahead and put you in the drug for
this computer. What kind of computer do you want? Do
you want a desktop? Do you want a laptop again?

(51:33):
Maybe you want a Mini this time? Maybe something different?
You know, I always hesitate on the Mini because it's
it's not a complete prize, you know, Like the Mini
needs a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse. So if
you don't have a monitor, keyboard and mouse at home, gee,
thanks for the Mini that I can't do anything with
or I appreciate it all right. So you probably heard
about this in the new Sixteen million passwords were reported

(51:55):
to be leaked this week. It was all over the
major media. It was all over MSN, popping up on
your screens everywhere, and it was all fake. It was
click bait to the nth degree. So there was not
a single leak of sixteen billion passwords number one, number two.
There was not a hacker that gathered up all the

(52:18):
loose passwords squirreling around the dark web and put it
into a sixteen billion password single file that was unprotected
on the Internet or something like that. Nope, wasn't that.
This was a report that says since the start of
twenty twenty five, there are over sixteen billion passwords, user names,
and passwords circulating on the darknet. That includes duplicates. So

(52:42):
a lot of them are in multiple places where it's
going to count them twice because it's just too hard
to go through them all. We would want to aggregate
them all together, you know what I mean. A lot
of these are from different breaches, you know, breaches from
years ago that are being re released. So it's not true.
So what do you do to protect yourself? We've talked

(53:03):
about that have I been pawned website before? Have I
been pwned? You know? You can go to that website
and you can put in your email address and it
will tell you if you have leaked passwords on the
dark Web that are compromised there and so you can
change them. Here's the thing, guys, passwords are so so
out of date. The new passkey technology is much better

(53:24):
if you have the option to use passkey. Use a passkey.
It's just like a little code to type on your computer,
but it links your device to the account. Otherwise, use
two factor authentication. Guys. Today's winner twenty five dollars Shock
Innovations give certificate is Michael. Congratulations Michael. We'll get that
out to you on Monday, and we'll see you folks
all again next weekend for another edition of Compute This