Blue Ridge Technology

Copilot Wave 3...What’s New? ​If your business runs on Microsoft 365, you’ve already encountered Copilot somewhere. Copilot is what powers that button that pops up offering to revise the email you’re writing and that AI-powered meeting summary that shows up when you end a Teams call. We’ve written about a few features here and there within Copilot and covered a few new feature releases. Now that Microsoft has dropped its Wave 3 update to Copilot, there’s a lot more to discuss. What Is Copilot? A Quick Refresher Copilot is Microsoft’s brand of modern generative AI tools, encompassing every user-facing AI feature within Windows 11 and Microsoft 365. Users can ask Copilot questions, use it to refine their creative output, generate meeting summaries, and so on. Admittedly, Microsoft’s move to Copilot hasn’t been controversy-free. Some users don’t love the very visible way Microsoft is rolling it out. Some businesses have privacy concerns, and some individuals and businesses a...

​Ah, the good ol’ CAPTCHA. You’ve seen them a million times: the original form is/was a small image with some distorted numbers and letters you have to decipher and type into a text box. Newer approaches include the photo CAPTCHA, where you’re clicking all the photos with stop signs or motorcycles or bridges in them, or the reCAPTCHA, Google’s take on the mechanism where you simply click a box that says “I’m not a robot.” Unfortunately, the FTC and many cybersecurity firms are warning that scammers have now figured out ways to turn the CAPTCHAs we know and love into yet another way to scam us. Here’s what you need to know about this new scam. What Are CAPTCHAs and RECAPTCHAs? CAPTCHA is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” And that’s exactly what they attempt to do: provide an obstacle that humans can easily solve but computers cannot. Text and photo-based CAPTCHAs and reCAPTCHAs are three ways to do the same thing: prove you’re ...

AI 4 Day Week? ​A four-day work week may sound amazing to some on your team (or maybe even you). But as appealing as it sounds, most US businesses aren’t ready for something that drastic. Still, there may be a part of your business that should run on a four-day work week: AI. Sounds a little off the rails at first, but let us explain. AI Is a Double-Edged Sword — Especially When You’re Stressed If you’ve tinkered with AI assistants like Microsoft Copilot, Claude, or ChatGPT, you already know: they can output content that sounds incredibly good. But they aren’t magic, and sometimes that incredibly-good-sounding content is, well, incredibly wrong. Other times, AI gets the facts right but the tone all wrong. So how should businesses use tools like these? As workflow enhancers, not workflow replacers. But on Friday, your team is stressed, busy, and already thinking about the weekend. That AI-generated draft of an email or report looks perfect at a glance. Your team member knows to do a “s...

Fake Update...Beware! ​Credit where it’s due: we have to admit, scammers are a persistent bunch. It feels like every three weeks or so we hear about a new approach to hack, scam, or otherwise access devices and data. This one’s a doozy… both because of how simple it is, and how easy it is to fall victim to it. Scammers Have Created a Fake Windows 11 Update It sounds almost impossible, but scammers have managed to create something that looks almost exactly like a real Windows 11 update. You can probably guess where this is going: click the link, download the update, and boom — it wasn’t actually an update. It was malware, and now you’re infected. It works because people inherently tend to trust big tech, at least in some ways. When Microsoft says “hey it’s time to update Windows to make it more secure,” very few consumers or businesses think “yeah, that might just be a scam.” That’s exactly what the scammers are counting on. If they can get you to that very realistic-looking webpage tha...