7 ways a giraffe can damage your device

With April the Giraffe about to give birth in the Animal Adventure Park in Harpursville, New York, it is time to warn readers of how a giraffe can damage their device in ways that a cat or dog would only dream of:

• Licking it – A giraffe’s tongue is about 50 cm long and black. Equipped to pluck the greenery off a thorny acacia tree, this could do a number on your smartphone.
• Stepping on it – A giraffe can weigh 830 kg. Even a quarter of that is a lot of stress for your touchscreen to handle.
• Kicking it – Giraffes are known to kick each other and lions. A phone, regardless of how much you value it, is nothing. And I ain’t lion.
• Malware – On a purely hypothetical level, April the Giraffe is likely to be misused to spread various types of malware – even if she has never, ever touched a computer or smartphone in her life. With a gestation period of 15 months, the bad guys have had a lot of time to plan out their attack – even is they are usually driven by automatic feeds of top Google searches.

My short list of four potential channels

1. Pictures with malware – Images posted by your favorite search engine can be spiked with malware.
2. Tweeted links – “it’s soooo cute,” click here to see more.
3. Shared GIFs on Facebook – short clips that are really stealing your contacts.
4. Sending emails with links to pictures – Spam emails with a giraffe theme.

For safer Giraffe gawking, here is a three-step solution

1. Use the Avira Protection Cloud browser extension to ID and block infected websites. After all, with millions of active users, we know the bad sites.
2. Click with care. Some hot news is just too hot to click on. So don’t. Thinking before clicking is a great life trait.
3. Go direct. Yes, you can go to the April the Giraffe‘s website and get the news for yourself. Or check out their social media links such as https://www.facebook.com/AnimalAdventurePark/ or https://www.twitter.com/AprilTheGiraffe or watch the live stream on Youtube (see below) directly. Why let others recycle the news? Go straight to the source.