CYBER

An AI-generated Biden called voters in New Hampshire ahead of the primary and told them to stay home. X locked down the search term “Taylor Swift” after AI-generated nudes of the pop giant flooded the platform. In the wake of both scandals, Congress has struggled with how to fight back against the flood of fake bullshit. Keeping the world from drowning in fakes affects all of us, but some of the cures sound worse than the sickness.

Ten years ago, Big Tech reached a peak. Facebook had wormed its way into the lives of billions of people. The mainstream news covered iPhones releases like they were Taylor Swift concerts. Elon Musk was promising to colonize Mars and fill the streets with self-driving cars. In 2024, the wheels have come off all these dreams. Musk has filled the sky with satellites, but no colonists, and constantly fights people on X. Self-driving c...

We live in a golden age of data. Every day, hacktivists release terabytes of data on sites like DDoSecrets, but sorting through it all requires some technical knowledge. What if you don’t know XML from SQL let alone how to write a simple Python script?

Micah Lee is the director of information security for The Intercept and he’s on Cyber today to talk about his new book: Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations. The book is a manual for peo...

The unreliable narrator of After World, the new novel from author Debbie Urbanski, is an AI tasked with writing a book about Sen, the last human on Earth. In this world, humanity is done. The world is moving on without us and Sen was born for a purpose: to watch the planet change itself without humanity. After World is a story about artificial intelligence, climate change, and what we can hope to leave behind for our children in a ...

According to the hype, artificial intelligence is changing everything. The truth is more complicated, but that doesn’t mean that companies and governments aren’t rushing to embrace the new technology. It’s even being used to update an old and destructive technology: nuclear weapons.

America is modernizing its force, Russia is building new kinds of nuclear weapons, and China is increasing its nuclear stockpile. At the same time, ...

The New York Times kicked off the holiday season by suing OpenAI and Microsoft. The paper of record believes that ChatGPT is violating various copyrights by using its articles as training data. It’s a landmark case that may end up before the Supreme Court and might change copyright law in America forever. 

This week on Cyber, Sharon Goldman of VentureBeat sits down with us to discuss the lawsuit, the coming presidential electio...

On February 3, a train crashed in East Palestine, Ohio releasing toxic chemicals into the air. Almost a month later, another train owned by the same company also derailed in Ohio. That’s not all. Trains in Charlotte are running slower than they should. NYC can’t fit trains into its new station. The list goes on and on.

What the hell is going on with mass transit in America?

If you’re a long time Cyber listener, you might already ...

As we slide into the winter holidays, Cyber is taking some time to relax with old friends and discuss the things that truly matter: the decline of the internet, creator culture, and the transcendent power of movies. 

This week on Cyber, Aftermath co-founder Gita Jackson stops by to talk about “Napoleon,” the death of film criticism, and what happens when a big name on YouTube plagiarizes you.

Stories discussed in this ep...

Your posts matter more than you think. Social media has changed the way wars are fought and the internet has become a new battlefield. 

Twitter may be dying, but it still matters an awful lot to policy makers. TikTok is ascendent, but often because its content can be repurposed on other platforms. Telegram can give you the news on the ground, but only if you trust the sources.

With all this information flowing and everyo...

The tensions between security and operations and developer teams are the stuff of legend. DevSecOps is trying to change that, and automation is a big part of making it possible. But automation alone can’t overcome entrenched behavior. Joylynn Kirui shares how Microsoft is helping teams prioritize security without bogging down development.

Follow and listen to Code Comments: https://link.chtbl.com/codecomments?sid=podcast.cy...

What happens when a for profit company is run by a non-profit board of directors who are ideologically opposed to the company’s product? You get something like what happened to OpenAI over the past week, which saw its board of directors sack CEO Sam Altman before eventually reinstating him and resigning. It’s a weird story that involves AI, predictions of the end of the world, strange pagan rites in Silicon Valley offices, and a Ha...

When “Alison” started working for Operation Underground Railroad, she wanted to make a difference in the lives of kids. She was a former Marine and social worker who’d seen the devastating effects that abuse could have on people. She wanted to stop it before it happened.

She ended up with a broken orbital bone, bleeding and vomiting in a gym after a training exercise gone wrong. This week on Cyber, Anna Merlan and Tim Marchman w...

It’s a bad time to be a crypto-person. Some of crypto’s biggest evangelists are facing serious federal jail time. FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted on seven counts of wire fraud, securities fraud, and money laundering after a disastrous trial. Some owners of Bored Ape NFTs experienced vision injuries at a recent gathering. Prices are in the toilet and SEC regulators are circling.

And yet, many crypto holders are holdin...

Rhino sounds like a good deal at first. When people move into a new apartment, they often have to pay a large lump sum security deposit to their landlord. For people who can’t pay, Rhino offers to bill them a little bit every month in lieu of the deposit. But there’s a catch: unlike security deposits, money sent to Rhino is never returned.  The company uses algorithms to make the wealthy pay less than poorer people, some rente...

Kias and Hyundais are being stolen in America at an alarming rate. Using a screwdriver and a USB cable, it’s trivially easy to steal one. Kia and Hyundai blame social media, but the problem is so overwhelming that several cities are suing the car manufacturer for creating a crime epidemic by electing not to build a $100 anti-theft device into some models.

This week on Cyber, Motherboard Reporter Aaron Gordon stops by to walk us ...

There’s a lot of reasons to be worried about the future. Climate change, nuclear weapons, space junk, and World War III are all threats both present and long-term. But, every day, people are trying to make the world a better place. It lands them in weird situations like skinny dripping with Soviet officers at the height of the Cold War or getting drunk with engineers in North Korea.

This week on Cyber, Dr. Jeffrey Lewis stops by...

Have you noticed your internet is …. kinda shitty? Does Spotfiy’s smart shuffle keep playing the same Cure song over and over again? Does a quick google search give you page after page of obvious advertisements? Want to leave Facebook behind but that one group chat keeps you checking in day after day?

Well have I got the book for you. It’s The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. It’s a little bit history, it’s a...

Luddites! It’s a dirty word, right? One that’s become synonymous with anti-technology crusaders that want to return us to an idyllic past where everyone is free from their phones. But who were the Luddites? Where does the term come from? How has it been misused and do we, perhaps, need a little more King Ludd in all our lives?

Brian Merchant is here to answer all our burning questions about Luddites and his new book Blood in the...

This summer, a movie called The Sound of Freedom took America by storm. The hero was Tim Ballard, the founder of an organization called Operation Underground Railroad. The movie depicted Ballard as an avenging hero who rescued trafficked children from a life of slavery. The truth, we’re all finding out, is something more complicated and a lot less heroic.

Ballard left the organization around the time Sound of Freedom premiered, ...