About The Local Vocal
The Local Vocal is a community cyber alert service that reports locally circulating threats, alerts and scams that may impact your organisation.
What it is
The Local Vocal is a free, plain-English security feed created and updated by Decision1. Each alert details down a real threat seen locally, what it looks like, how it works, and what to do about it.
Why it exists
Most security advice is either too technical or too generic to be useful. We see the scams and phishing campaigns actually landing in local inboxes, so we turn that first-hand intelligence into short, honest alerts anyone on your team can understand.
What we hope you get out of it
When it comes to cyber threats, forewarned is forearmed! These alerts give you an early warning of what is circulating close to home, hopefully before the threat reaches you, so you can have the confidence to spot the scam.
About the AI behind the Vocal
Have we used AI to build this site?
Yes, we have. AI has helped us in many ways for this site, and it would not be possible without it — or at least would be much harder to achieve otherwise.
- •Build the site.
- •Pick the colour scheme.
- •Analyse the threat data.
- •Collect 3rd party threat alerts.
- •Write the articles.
- •Put the relevant article details together, in a readable format.
- •Proofread the articles.
- •Pick the articles.
- •Pick the threat types we report on.
- •Pick the layout style.
- •Pick the order articles are released in.
- •Pick the data points displayed in an article.
- •Publish the articles.
Huh, I couldn't tell!
There are a few tell-tale signs that a site was built with AI, which can help you spot them.
- Eyebrows.
- AI loves an eyebrow, and they use them everywhere. If you see a title, more than likely that title will have a happy eyebrow-subtitle sitting on top. It's weird, but kind of cute too. See if you can spot them on this site!
- Tags.
- If you have data, AI wants to tag it.
- Bullets.
- These can look like eyebrows, but without their title. These are usually to display the tags AI is obsessed with.
- Overly consistent branding.
- AI is really good at doing the same thing, every time, and can apply a branding scheme to perfection. This usually looks a little too polished.
- Overly designed fonts.
- If you see a font that you might have only seen on highly designed sites previously — like a marketer or an artist would use — but you are on a business page, then it's probably AI.
- The letter z.
- The AI models most commonly used here in New Zealand were trained on American English, so that is the AI's default when it comes to language usage. We can try to talk it out of using it, but it will almost always sneak back in when you are not looking!
- Icons.
- So many icons! AI is convinced we are terrible readers…
- The colour fade.
- AI can do a font colour fade with ease, but it's not a common technique elsewhere, because it can be quite hard to achieve.
- A parallax background.
- AI loves these for some reason.
- The isolation card.
- Boxes and boxes and boxes of text (this site is very guilty of this!).
- Perfectly rounded edges, or the square-ist square you have ever seen.
- There is no in between.
Why have you used AI?
This site is data heavy, scraping information from a long list of sources, so for us it made sense for AI to do the heavy lifting. We have been using AI tools for a while, so we are feeling pretty confident about the tools we use — we know what they can and can't reasonably do — so we knew that an AI tool could create this space for us to share with you, without over-burdening our time to do it.
Should I be worried about this site?
We don't think so, but we would say that wouldn't we! When it comes to AI website builder tools, they are like any website builder tool, in that they are very powerful, so can be used for good, or not. The AI is not inherently bad, but the people using them might be. Just as a scammer can set up a Squarespace site to trick you into buying something, so can a scammer use an AI-built website to trick you.
If you are concerned, then you should always follow your instincts, and stay away.
Local, clear, and free
Decision1 is a Dunedin-based IT and cyber security team who have looked after Otago and Southland organisations since 2001. The Local Vocal is our way of helping to protect the local community from scams and hackers. No login is required, there are no ads, and nothing to buy.
For more information you can always contact us here, or check us out here.