Episode 58: Is Your MSP Actually Securing Your Network?

With that out of the way, The next thing I want to talk about is something that we got brought into yesterday, day before yesterday, and this is the Tom Kettle debacle.

I'm calling it the Tom Kettle debacle.

Yeah, it's isolated.

It's not been like a national news story.

And this ties into really why you need to have assurance on things.

Yes.

So for those that don't know, Time Kettle is a device that does translation in real time, basically using AI.

So we've got a client that has Portuguese-speaking students where the teacher will speak English, it will translate it to Portuguese, Portuguese back to English, and it does all of that in real time.

Now, this school is in Texas.

The problem with that is Time Kettle is a Chinese company, right? Now, normally, I wouldn't even care about this.

But the problem is we found that communication from those devices was going back to China, to Shenzhen province or whatever it was, right? Yeah, homeland.

Exactly.

Exactly.

So, of course, we alert on it.

Hey, you've got Chinese, you got traffic going to mainland China.

Which this device is not on the Texas ban list that I can see.

No, but we have also had very direct communication from the governor's office that nothing should be reaching out to China, more or less.

If you read in between the lines of the governor's order, he does not want any traffic on state or local government networks going back to China.

I bet you if he had his way, he wouldn't have anything in Texas going back to

China.

But specifically, local government, local education agencies, higher ed, state government, cities and counties.

It's not specifically banned, but it's going out to China.

You don't want to have that political fight regardless.

I think there's a more egregious part to this, actually.

And you may have been going this direction anyways.