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Phishing Tests, the Bane of Work Life, Are Getting Meaner

3 months 1 week ago
U.S. employers are deploying increasingly aggressive phishing tests to combat cyber threats, sparking backlash from workers who say the simulated scams create unnecessary panic and distrust in the workplace. At the University of California, Santa Cruz, a test email about a fake Ebola outbreak sent staff scrambling before learning it was a security drill. At Lehigh Valley Health Network, employees who fall for phishing tests lose external email access, with termination possible after three failures. Despite widespread use, recent studies question these tests' effectiveness. Research from ETH Zurich found that phishing tests combined with voluntary training actually made employees more vulnerable, while a University of California, San Diego study showed only a 2% reduction [PDF] in phishing success rates. "These are just an ineffective and inefficient way to educate users," said Grant Ho, who co-authored the UCSD study.

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Amazon Will Spend Nearly A Year Of AWS Revenue On AI Investments

3 months 1 week ago

There is a bit of AI spending one-upmanship going on among the hyperscalers and cloud builders – and now the foundation model builders who are partnering with their new sugar daddies to be able to afford to build vast AI accelerator estates to push the state of the art in model capabilities and intelligence. …

Amazon Will Spend Nearly A Year Of AWS Revenue On AI Investments was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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Google Pulls Incorrect Gouda Stat From Its AI Super Bowl Ad

3 months 1 week ago
An anonymous reader shares a report: Google has edited Gemini's AI response in a Super Bowl commercial to remove an incorrect statistic about cheese. The ad, which shows a small business owner using Gemini to write a website description about Gouda, no longer says the variety makes up "50 to 60 percent of the world's cheese consumption." In the edited YouTube video, Gemini's response now skips over the specifics and says Gouda is "one of the most popular cheeses in the world." Google Cloud apps president Jerry Dischler initially defended the response, saying on X it's "grounded in the Web" and "not a hallucination."

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