Before we get to the good stuff for this week, a reminder that Ashton is hosting our second annual Earth Day recycling day(s) on Friday April 18th (730A-300P) and Saturday April 19th (9A-11A). You’re welcome to stop by our office to drop off any technology recycling you’re looking to get out of your home or office; laptops, PCs, hard drives, cords, handheld devices, speakers, printers, fax machines, etc. Just no TVs! We’ll dispose of everything for you, and can provide certificates of destruction for hard drives if you need them. Best thing is, there’s no cost to you, and you get to visit us!
As for the good stuff, scroll on down for Wile E. Coyote, malapropisms, mosaics, social engineering, and more.
Something about ...
AI and Google
If you’re using Google to get to the DeepSeek AI platform, be sure to check the links you’re clicking before you actually click them. Hackers have spoofed the DeepSeek platform and are using it to spread malware. Google has been working diligently to remove fake ads from their platform, but as you can imagine, that’s an uphill battle.
In other AI-related news, Travis had a few minutes of free time on Monday and updated the team headshots on our website. Take a look and see if you can figure whether option A or option B are the originals. First person to message me with the correct answer wins a box of Ashton swag!
Malapropisms
Thanks to regular reader Kurt Nelson for letting me know that the link for this one didn’t work last week. Too good to ignore, so this time, the link actually works;
Back when I worked at Progressive Insurance, I had a manager who could always be counted on for a good malapropism during a team meeting. Complaining about our team not getting due credit, she let loose with “we keep getting the short stick in the end”. It got so bad that I started making notes every time she did this, and that usually got everybody in the room laughing, while she remained clueless. I couldn’t help but share this piece about a Ford Motor employee who kept even better track of malapropisms than I did.
Oracle Cloud Breach?
While the insiders are denying it (of course), numerous cybersecurity experts are confident that Oracle’s cloud infrastructure has recently been breached. This stems from a dark web posting offering six million records from Oracle’s cloud infrastructure. It’s not something that we use for our client base, but if you’re in the Oracle cloud, you’ll probably want to click through and share with your IT partners and providers.
23 and Me
You’ve probably seen by now the fact that genetic testing company 23 and Me has filed for bankruptcy (this after a big data breach some years back). No big deal, right? Unless you’re one of the millions of people who sent your DNA to them to figure out your heritage. Now, after it’s been recommended that people log in to delete their data, the website has crashed and users are rightly concerned about who might be able to access personal information.
Tile Robots
As I was scrolling through my LinkedIn connections this week, a former KeyBank colleague appeared. After various banking CMO roles, she’s now the president of a mosaic tile manufacturer in Boston. Having been a tile husband for many years, I clicked through to her profile and then to the company website and saw that, rather than making mosaic tiles by hand, they do it with robots.
Show Pigs
We try to get to the Great Geauga County Fair every year, and as much as I enjoy checking out all the different animal barns, I’ve never seen the show pigs in action. Maybe we’ll have to look them up this year.
Social Engineering
This is a really long and pretty technical article about social engineering as a tool for hackers to gain access to your systems. I’ve done you a favor and read it so that you don’t have to; if you go to a website or get an email attachment and you’re asked to copy and paste text, or execute a command, don’t do it. Ask somebody (your IT resource) who knows what they’re doing to take a look at it. (Just found another piece on the ClickFix scam that is a little easier to digest).
We recently had a client end user who was fooled by this exact scam. Fortunately, our Sophos endpoint security stopped the hack and remediated everything on the spot. That said, this is another great reminder that you might have every security solution on the market, but you still have users and you never know what they’ll do. Security training like that from KnowBe4 is a great way to keep your users informed and on the lookout for scams.
Art Forgeries
I was going to include this one in the bit above about AI, since there’s mention of using AI to determine whether art is original or forged. And then there was mention of a fake Jackson Pollock (given away by an obvious misspelling of the artist’s name).
Nancy's Nuggets
It’s safe to say that I will never own a self-driving car. I don’t like it when other people drive me, so why would I like it when nobody is driving me? Nancy sent me this article with corresponding video showing a test between Tesla’s camera system and the LIDAR used in other self-driving technology. Of course, I was hooked when I read this test was based on Wile E. Coyote’s efforts to stop Roadrunner…
The Indians home opener is (supposed to be) on Tuesday afternoon, but the forecast calls for 29 and snow. We’ll find a place for a few beers before the game, and while we won’t be tailgating, we will be dressed like football season. Even if we were tailgating, it wouldn’t be with Bud Light or Miller Lite. That said, Ohio seems to be a reasonably priced place if you’re looking to buy a two-four (with the current exchange rate, Canadian prices are about the same as Alaska)
Have a great weekend.
Abbey