Customs and Border Protection is scanning people’s social media, the feds have arrested some swatters, and the FTC has ordered Ring to cough up a fine. This week on Cyber, Motherboard’s premier cyber crime reporter Joseph Cox is back to walk us through the latest in privacy violations done by Washington and the private sector. We’ll also take another look at the criminal world of SIM swappers and auto-swatters.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Homeland Security Uses AI Tool to Analyze Social Media of U.S. Citizens and Refugees

'The Comm': The Group Linked to a Nationwide Swatting Rampage

FTC Orders Ring to Pay $5.8 Million in Refunds For Surveilling Customers, Failing to Stop Hackers

Russian FSB Accuses U.S. of Hacking Thousands of iPhones in Russia

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show. 

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Is there anything artificial intelligence can’t do?Debt collectors want AI to push people into coughing up what’s owed. An AI created photo of an attack on the Pentagon generated a minor panic. There’s an AI that can read your mind and the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, just testified before Congress.

This week on Cyber, Motherboard reporter Chloe Xiang comes on to walk us through the big headlines in the world of AI.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Debt Collectors Want To Use AI Chatbots To Hustle People For Money

Verified Twitter Accounts Spread AI-Generated Hoax of Pentagon Explosion

AI Reconstructs 'High-Quality' Video Directly from Brain Readings in Study

Worried About Sending Your Data to a Chatbot? 'PrivateGPT' Is Here

OpenAI Tells Congress the U.S. Should Create AI 'Licenses' to Release New Models

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show. 

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Crypto and crime, crime and crypto. They go together like spreadsheets and tax evasion. When cryptocurrency hit the scene it was, according to its evangelists, going to usher in a world of decentralized currency and free everyone from the shackles of oppressive central banks. Turns out it’s also been a pretty great way to launder money.

It’s also the subject of the new book Red Team Blues, a novel from writer Cory Doctorow. In Red Team Blues a 67 year old forensic accountant finds himself at the center of a crypto-crime mystery that takes him from the heights of silicon valley to the depths of the Tenderloin. This week on Cyber, Doctorow walks us through a brief history of the valley and why he wrote three books about an old accountant during the pandemic.

Doctorow is the author of more than two dozen books and too many articles to count. He’s currently blogging at pluralistic.net.

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We talk a lot about encrypted phones on Cyber. Everyone loves a secure communication channel that no one can peer into. But some companies, well, if there’s criminal activity going on they’re gonna sell you out. And the cops have gotten very good at setting up honeypots and hacking into existing networks.

But there’s one encrypted service out there that is, as far as we know, still secure. It’s called No. 1 Business Communication and it’s a favorite of the Italian Mafia. On this episode of Cyber, Joseph Cox comes on to explain how and why No. 1 Business Communication has survived in a world where authorities have shut down the competition. 

Stories discussed in this episode:

Inside the Italian Mafia’s Encrypted Phone of Choice

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch and YouTube. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

 

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If you’re watching or listening to this show you’re probably doing it on a device that owes its very existence to the Apple II. But these days we remember the iPhone, 90s era Windows, and even the Macintosh as these big benchmark moments in widespread adoption of tech.

But all those devices wouldn't be here if it weren’t for the little Apple II board that could and the people who turned a hobbyist curiosity into a fundamental part of every household in the world.

That story is the subject of the new book The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal. This week on Cyber, author Laine Nooney comes on to talk about The Apple II Age and how the little machine ushered in a new world of personal computing. Nooney is also an assistant professor of Media and Information Studies at New York University and the founding editor of ROMchip: A Journal of Games Histories.

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When Elon Musk posted a video of himself arriving at Twitter HQ carrying a white sink along with the message “let that sink in!” it marked the end of a dramatic takeover. Musk had gone from Twitter critic to “Chief Twit” in the space of just a few months but his arrival didn’t put an end to questions about his motives. Musk had earned a reputation as a business maverick. From PayPal to Tesla to SpaceX, his name was synonymous with big, earth-shattering ideas. So, what did he want with a social media platform? And was this all really in the name of free speech...or was this all in the name of Elon Musk?

From Wondery, the makers of WeCrashed and In God We Lust, comes the wild story of how the richest man alive took charge of the world’s “digital public square.”

Listen to Flipping The Bird: Wondery.fm/FTB_Cyber

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It looks like a bluetooth speaker or an old Nokia cellphone. But that’s a disguise. Inside these small devices is everything car thieves need to break into your vehicle. There are telegram channels now where, for a few thousand dollars, you can buy a device that will break into a car in seconds.

Motherboard reporter Joseph Cox is here on Cyber this week to walk us through it.

Stories discussed in this episode:

The Car Thieves Using Tech Disguised Inside Old Nokia Phones and Bluetooth Speakers

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Automation is making everyone’s lives easier, including people who call in fake bomb threats on crowded public locations. We live in a world where pranksters and criminals can summon a massive police presence with the click of a few buttons. On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard staff writer Joseph Cox is here to tell us all about it.

Stories discussed in this episode:

A Computer Generated Swatting Service Is Causing Havoc Across America

Smart Garage Company Fixes Vulnerability by Breaking Customers' Devices

Hackers Can Remotely Open Smart Garage Doors Across the World

IRS Wants to Buy Internet Mass Monitoring Tool

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch and YouTube. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show. 

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Top Secret classified Pentagon documents leaked on a Minecraft Discord server. The pages of documents contain sensitive information about troop placements in Ukraine, rumors about allies, and—weirdly—a character sheet for a tabletop roleplaying game. 

On this episode of Cyber, host Matthew Gault takes a back seat and lets Motherboard editor-in-chief Jason Koebler interrogate him about what’s in these classified Pentagon documents.

Pentagon’s Ukraine War Plans Leaked on Minecraft Discord Before Telegram and Twitter

Leaked Pentagon Docs Share Wild Rumor: Kremlin Plans to ‘Throw’ Putin’s War While He’s Getting Chemo

Leaked Classified Documents Also Include Roleplaying Game Character Stats

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A terrible April Fool’s day glitch screws over Uber drivers, tenants in California are striking back against landlords, and private banks: do we need them?

Today’s episode of Cyber is a cypher, that infrequent version of the show where we decipher some recent tech news. It’s a potpourri for the panopticon age. A grab bag of tech horrors, a not so gentle reminder that our work is not yet done.

Motherboard reporter Roshan Abraham is here to talk about it all.

'Screwed': Uber Claws Back Double Pay from Drivers After April Fools Glitch

Tenants of America's Biggest Landlord Form Union to Fight Evictions, Rent Hikes

Want to Curb City Crime? Evict Fewer Tenants, Study Says

Private Banks Are In Crisis. What If They Were Public Banks?

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch and YouTube. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show. 

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Facial recognition systems are here. They’ve been deployed extensively along America’s southern border and in its cities. Authoritarian regimes in Iran and Russia are using the technology to crack down on dissidents and what’s going on in Moscow right now paints a horrifying picture of how dangerous the tech has become.

On this episode of Cyber, Lena Masri is here to talk about it. She’s the author of a new report at Reuters about how Putin uses facial recognition to curb dissent.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Facial recognition is helping Putin curb dissent with the aid of U.S. tech

U.S. Hardware Is Fueling Russia's Facial Recognition Crackdown on Anti-War Dissidents

AI Use by Cops, Child Services In NYC Is a Mess: Report

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Love it or hate it, you can’t escape artificial intelligence. People are using Midjourney to make viral photos of Donald Trump’s arrest and the Pop’s puffy coat. Redditors are creating entire fake historical events and backing it up with AI-generated photos. Silicon Valley seems to think this tech is the next big thing, with Google and Microsoft betting big on it and some people begging everyone to pause development for six months.

Is AI changing the world? With us here today to try to answer that question is Motherboard reporter Chloe Xiang.

Stories discussed in this episode:

People Are Creating Records of Fake Historical Events Using AI

ChatGPT Can Replace the Underpaid Workers Who Train AI, Researchers Say

The Open Letter to Stop 'Dangerous' AI Race Is a Huge Mess

'He Would Still Be Here': Man Dies by Suicide After Talking with AI Chatbot, Widow Says

AI Theorist Says Nuclear War Preferable to Developing Advanced AI

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch and YouTube. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show. 

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In America, no one can protect you from a transportation employee being paid off by the feds.

 

The Drug Enforcement Agency has a single remit: to prosecute America’s long-failed war on drugs. Joseph Cox is on today’s episode of Cyber to talk about one its shadier practices and the senators who want answers from the Department of Justice. It turns out that the DEA has been paying Amtrak and commercial package companies to act as informants and supply data on customers without having to get a warrant.

Stories discussed in this episode:

The DEA Bought Customer Data from Rogue Employees Instead of Getting a Warrant

The 'Insanely Broad' RESTRICT Act Could Ban Much More Than Just TikTok

Here is the FBI’s Contract to Buy Mass Internet Data

Cops Sue Afroman for 'Emotional Distress' After He Made Music Videos of Botched Raid

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch and YouTube. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show. 

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America is thinking about banning the most popular social media app in the world. TikTok has exploded in the past few years and whether you love it or hate it, you can’t deny its huge influence.

Legislators in America are concerned about that influence, especially because of TikTok’s connections to China. On Thursday, TikTok’s CEO testified before the House’s Committee on Energy and Commerce and fielded questions about the app, its connection to China, and what it might be doing to America’s children.

It was a shitshow.

Motherboard’s Social Media Manager, Emily Lipstein, is on this episode of Cyber talking about.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Congress Shocked to Discover 10 Year Olds Check the ‘I’m Over 18’ Box Online

Banning TikTok Is Unconstitutional, Ludicrous, and a National Embarrassment

Follow Motherboard on TikTok to see the Congressional footage

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch and YouTube. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show. 

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It’s almost impossible to get retail priced tickets to The Cure’s newest live tour. Fans are, once again, turning to the secondary market despite the band’s insistence that Ticketmaster shut it down. 

This week on Cyber, Joseph Cox and Motherboard Motherboard editor-in-chief Jason Koebler take us into the world of the ticket scalper, where whole Ticketmaster accounts are being sold in bulk and a “verified fan” is just someone the algorithm approves of.

Stories discussed in this episode:

The Cure Tried to Stop Scalpers. Brokers Are Selling Entire Ticketmaster Accounts Instead

Ticketmaster Cancels Public Sale for Taylor Swift Tickets Because It Already Sold Them All

Blink-182 Tickets Are So Expensive Because Ticketmaster Is a Disastrous Monopoly and Now Everyone Pays Ticket Broker Prices

The Man Who Broke Ticketmaster

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch and YouTube. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show. 

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In America the trains never seem to run on time. 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 know some of the answers to this question. That’s thanks to returning champion, Motherboard senior writer Aaron Gordon.

Stories discussed in this episode:

East Palestine Derailment ‘Foreseeable and Preventable,’ Ohio Attorney General Lawsuit Alleges

24 Hours of News Shows America's Transportation Hellscape

The Worst Transit Project in the U.S. Is Officially Dead

Boston's Subway Was Running at Half Speed Because It Lost Paperwork

‘We Had All the Issues That Town Has:’ East Palestine Is Not the First or Last Derailment Disaster

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch and YouTube. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

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Collapse. It’s the word on everybody’s lips. Silicon Valley Bank and Signature are no more. The banks, folks, they’ve collapsed. But don’t worry, these aren’t your typical banks. SVB and Signature were not the kinds of places working class folks were holding checking accounts. These were massive institutions that propped up America’s ailing tech sector. If you’ve been hustled by an NFT startup in the past year, there’s a good chance it had deposits at SVB.

But now they’re gone and, after some panic, it looks like America’s blessed institutions are working as intended. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is gonna clean all this up. But should they?

On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard Managing Editor Jordan Pearson sits down to answer the question.

Stories discussed in this episode:

How Silicon Valley's Bank Imploded

Are Failing Banks About to Destroy the Economy?

OK, WTF Is Up With the Government Bailing Out the Tech Industry?

WSJ Wonders: Did Silicon Valley Bank Die Because One Black Person Was on Its Board?

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch and YouTube. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

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It’s Cipher time, baby. It’s that infrequent style of Cyber we do where we decipher Motherboard’s tech coverage in a potpourri for the panopticon age. 

On today’s episode we’ve got a little bit of everything. A popular hiking app reveals that, once again, we just can’t trust private companies with our data. But what about our passwords? Surely a company that bills itself as a secure way to remember all those logins is secure right? Nope! Also, Twitter ditches Tor and, just for fun, another wonderful story about cheating in online video games.

Motherboard’s own Joseph Cox is here to walk us through all of it.

Stories discussed in this episode:

AllTrails Data Exposes Precise Movements of Former Top Biden Official

Twitter’s Most Important Anti-Censorship Tool Is Currently Dead

‘Escape From Tarkov’ Roiled By Severe Cheating Accusations

LastPass Shouldn't Be Trusted With Your Passwords

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On February 4, 2023, an F-22 fighter jet committed the first air to air kill in the weapons history. It was an alleged Chinese spy balloon near Myrtle Beach. In the days that followed the F-22 would score another kill, this time against a mysterious floating object above the Yukon.

But this second object hadn’t come from China. Hobbyists, in fact, think it might be one of their balloons. Across the world there is a small but dedicated group of people who love launching tiny balloons into the sky.

It’s been a weird month for the community. What with the fighter jets patrolling the sky and constant reports of UFOs. On this week’s Cyber, Motherboard reporter Becky Ferreria stops by to talk about the amateur balloonists who lived through the great balloon panic of 2023.

Stories discussed in this episode:

'Unfortunate and Amusing': Balloon Enthusiasts Undeterred by U.S. Air Force Shootdowns

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YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok are awash in people reacting to horrifying videos. 2 girls 1 cup, Tubgirl, Goatse, and websites like Ogrish.com shaped the modern internet. Appropriating and sharing these horrifying images and videos was a big part of what people did during the early days of the web.

But why? And how do these shocking viral sensations translate onto the modern and sanitized web? This week on Cyber, Blake Hester stops by to walk us through it all.

Stories discussed in this episode:

How Shock Sites Shaped the Internet

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Banks in the U.S. and Europe tout voice ID as a secure way to log into your account. We proved it's possible to trick such systems with free or cheap AI-generated voices.

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AI has made the voice of Emma Watson say some very strange things, and 4Chan is to blame. But trolls playing with new machine-learning tools aren’t the only villain in this story. Actors are being asked to sign away the rights to their own voice for the purposes of AI reconstruction.

Also on today’s episode: Dutch police have been reading encrypted messages; some politicians in the UK want to ban encrypted phones; Apple is looking to roll out a new form of end-to-end encryption; and a police contractor that promised to track homeless people has been hacked.

Cypher. We’re bringing it back. For those that don’t know, Cypher is a special edition of Cyber where we decipher the week’s news. It’s a potpourri for the panopticon. A grab bag of tech horror stories. And who better to join us for such an adventure than Motherboard reporter Joseph Cox?

Stories discussed in this episode:

AI-Generated Voice Firm Clamps Down After 4chan Makes Celebrity Voices for Abuse

UK Proposes Making the Sale and Possession of Encrypted Phones Illegal

‘Disrespectful to the Craft:’ Actors Say They’re Being Asked to Sign Away Their Voice to AI

Dutch Police Read Messages of Encrypted Messenger 'Exclu'

Apple's End-to-End iCloud Could Be a Security Game Changer

Police Contractor That Promised to Track Homeless People Hacked

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch and YouTube. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

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What if you could watch new episodes of your favorite shows, forever?

That’s one of the promises of artificial intelligence. On Twitch, the show Nothing, Forever pumped out episode after episode of content that was kind of like an episode of Seinfeld.

Larry Feinberg told jokes, lived in NYC, and cavorted around with a crazy cast of characters. The show drew a lot of attention. And then Larry told a transphobic joke during an interstitial standup bit and the show was banned.

On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard editor-in-chief Jason Koebler stops by to relay the saga of Nothing, Forever.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Conservatives Are Panicking About AI Bias, Think ChatGPT Has Gone 'Woke'

Developers Created AI to Generate Police Sketches. Experts Are Horrified

People are 'Jailbreaking' ChatGPT to Make It Endorse Racism, Conspiracies

Conservatives Are Obsessed With Getting ChatGPT to Say the N-Word

Thousands of People Can’t Stop Watching AI-Generated Sitcom ‘Nothing, Forever’

AI-Generated 'Seinfeld' Show Banned on Twitch After Transphobic Standup Bit

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What would you give to live forever? Hell, what would you give to have the body of an 18-year-old well into your 40s? That’s the goal of tech CEO Bryan Johnnson. He is, by his own estimation, the most measured man on the planet. He takes 112 to 130 pills a day. He eats a restrictive diet. He has automated his body. It’s an expensive process. And one that robbed him of what many of us would see as the simple joys of life. Drinks with a friend. Late night pizza. A little sugar in your bowl.

Motherboard Senior Editor Maxwell Strachan just spent some time with Johnson and he’s here today on Cyber to tell us all about it.

‘The Most Measured Man in Human History’

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On January 31, a court in Iran handed out a combined sentence of 10 years to a couple who danced outside of Azadi Tower in Tehran, Iran. A film of the brief dance went viral on Instagram and Twitter. They’re 21 and 22 years old. The woman was not wearing a hijab.

The long sentence for a viral post is part of a pattern in Iran. In response to protests, the Iranian government is using technology and violence to suppress its people. Iran is a pioneer in the use of new technologies like AI and facial recognition to suppress dissent and enforce the will of the state.

On this episode of Cyber, Mahsa Alimardani—a senior researcher at Article 19 and a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford—comes on the show to talk about how Iran is pioneering the modern surveillance state.

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch and YouTube. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

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In 2016, Americans working in Cuba began to experience something strange. Something that is, to this day, unexplained. They felt a pressure in the brain, a ringing in their ear, and in the aftermath … a distressing sense of fatigue. This is Havana Syndrome, a mysterious ailment that felled spies and diplomats.

It remains a mystery to this day, one U.S. government officials have a hard time talking about let alone understanding. Sometimes it sounds like a frightening new weapon, other times like a classic moral panic. But what was it really? Will we ever know?

This is all the subject of a new podcast from VICE World News called Havana Syndrome. Over the course of the show’s nine episodes it unpacks not just the mysterious syndrome, but a history of spy and counterspy, the CIA, and America’s complicated relationship with Cuba.

With me here today to talk about it all is series producer Jesse Alejandro Cottrell.

Go here to check out ‘Havana Syndrome’ from VICE World News.

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We've all heard about how Facebook is destroying democracy. How Twitter enables the loudest, dumbest voices to have the most influence. How Instagram has ruined an entire generation's self esteem. But what if there is a social media network even more important than those?

Every day, people are gathering online in this space to organize powerful political movements. They’re sharing details of what’s going on, locally, getting organized, and fighting each other in an online cage match of American politics.

It’s time to talk about Nextdoor.

On today’s episode of Cyber, Motherboard Senior Writer Aaron Gordon comes on to talk about the wild world of Nextdoor.

Stories discussed in this episode:

How Nextdoor Put Neighbors In a Housing Policy 'Cage Match'

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch and YouTube. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

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Replika is a chatbot that you can find on the App Store. It bills itself as a companion that can, if you pay, become something more. The ads on the internet offer a repertoire of sexually suggestive services including kinky roleplay and on-demand sexy photographs.

But what if you just want to talk? People in the Replika community are complaining that the chatbot has taken a turn recently, making unwanted comments and sending unsolicited lewds. Some users think it’s all about money.

On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard Senior Editor Samantha Cole stops by to help us unravel the mystery of the AI that got too horny.

Stories discussed in this episode:

‘My AI Is Sexually Harassing Me’: Replika Users Say the Chatbot Has Gotten Way Too Horny

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Recent remarks from Richard Trumka Jr., one of the three commissioners with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), sparked outrage in some circles. As it turns out, gas stoves aren’t great for you, and the CPSC has considered regulating them. Pretty soon politicians were sharing images of gas ranges above the words “Come and Take It.”

Why does it feel lately like the only war America is any good at fighting is the culture war? What is the actual science behind gas stoves? And why, while we’re asking national questions, does C-SPAN look so good lately?

On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard Senior Writer Aaron Gordon stops by to explain it all.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Here Come the Gas Stove Culture Wars

Why C-SPAN’s Camera Work Is Suddenly So Interesting

C-SPAN Is Once Again Asking the House to Relax Filming Rules So It Can Document Its Dysfunction

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Encrypted app for criminals Cipher is rebranding to go above-board, California has got new digital license plates with strange security implications, a researcher made deepfaked demands for a refund to Wells Fargo, and the American military is trying to ply Gen Z gamers with sweet sweet streams.

On today’s Cyber, we’re playing catch up with Motherboard reporter Joseph Cox.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Researchers Could Track the GPS Location of All of California’s New Digital License Plates

Ciphr, Encrypted App That Served Organized Crime, Rebrands as Enterprise Software

Researcher Deepfakes His Voice, Uses AI to Demand Refund From Wells Fargo

U.S. Army Planned to Pay Streamers Millions to Reach Gen-Z Through Call of Duty

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Facial recognition technology is here. Whether we like it or not, cameras all across the world are scanning faces and building databases. 

There’s a popular misconception that technology is objective and unbiased. But that’s not true. All systems carry the biases of the people who created them, and nowhere is that more evident than in facial recognition systems.

Today’s show is about how those biases come to bear, and the dangers of running recklessly forward without considering the consequences. All the way back in 2013, the University of North Carolina, Wilmington published a dataset meant for facial recognition systems. It contained more than 1 million images of trans people, pulled from YouTube, showing them at various stages of their transition.

This was done without the permission of the original posters. Why? Because terrorists might take hormones to alter their face and beat border control systems.

It gets weirder from there.

Here to help us tell the story is Os Keyes. Keyes is a researcher and PhD candidate at the University of Washington’s Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering. They’re also the co-author of Feeling fixes: Mess and emotion in algorithmic audits, which is a scientific audit of the dataset we’re going to be talking about today.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Facial Recognition Researcher Left a Trans Database Exposed for Years After Using Images Without Permission

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Apple has democratized stalking for the modern world. With the Airtag you can keep track of your luggage and your estranged spouse.

There’s been an uptick in stalking cases with Apple Airtags at the center and the legal system doesn’t quite know what to do. Often, the cops and the prosecutors don’t even know what an Airtag is. So what do you do when there’s technology at the center of your legal battle, technology that the authorities do not understand.

Today on Cyber, Motherboard Senior Editor Samantha Cole comes on to walk us through it.

Stories discussed in this episode:

The Legal System Is Completely Unprepared for Apple AirTag Stalking

How ‘Porn Addiction’ Took Hold of the Internet

Republicans Are Panicking Because They Somehow Just Found Out You Can Buy Vibrators at CVS

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We all love a good chatbot, some nice AI art, and a pleasant automated system. Artificial intelligence is here and these fancy decision trees are supposed to make our lives easier everyday without a human ever having to lift a finger.

Except that’s not exactly true. AIs require an incredible amount of human input to train; AI art doesn’t make nightmares reality without scanning over millions of human-made images; and Meta’s content didn’t learn how to moderate itself with a human first telling it what to look for.

So who are these people who teach AI and why do we never hear about them?

On today’s episode of Cyber, Motherboard writer Chloe Xiang will help us answer that question.

Stories discussed in this episode:

AI Isn’t Artificial or Intelligent

ISIS Executions and Non-Consensual Porn Are Powering AI Art

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An online prophet that claims to be god. A murder in the Alabama woods. A child holding a shotgun in the middle of a camp. Reptilians. Urine therapy. The American South. Police violence. Conspiracy. Robot birds. The uniquely American black esoteric tradition. 

This episode of Cyber is a big and surreal story about a New Age movement that’s spread through livestreams. Its followers are decentralized, driven by belief rather than any organizing principle, but at the center of it all is a prophet who claims to be god and is sitting in jail on some pretty serious charges.

Here to talk about the story is Motherboard Senior Staff Writer Anna Merlan and Editorial Director Tim Marchman.

Stories discussed in this episode:

An Online Prophet Claims to Be a God. His Followers Keep Getting Arrested.

Followers of Charismatic New Age Influencer Accused of Two Different Murders in Alabama

Suspects in Bizarre ‘Off-Grid’ Alabama Shooting Posted About New Age Conspiracy Theories, Followed a Controversial Content Creator

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch and YouTube. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

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This episode of Cyber is an action packed double feature that feels like it’s been pulled directly from a Cyberpunk novel. That’s right, today is all about railway strikes and killer robots. It’s hard to be a railway worker in America. The schedules are a nightmare, the kind of working conditions that can make someone sick. Just don’t try to use your sick days. Facing a railway strike, Congress passed legislation to prevent it. All at the behest of the White House. We’ll get into that. 

Then we’ll talk about San Francisco. The City by the Bay has written the rules of killer robots. SF won’t have the first police department that’s killed someone with a drone, just the first with rules.

With me today to talk about it is Motherboard Senior Writer Aaron Gordon. He’s been following both stories. You may remember he was on the show more at the start of the year talking about the horrifying conditions of America’s rail workers.

Stories discussed in this episode:

The Most Complicated Labor Negotiation in the Country Just Got More Complicated

Once Again, Rail Workers Lose

More than 500 Labor Historians Condemn Biden’s Intervention in Freight Rail Dispute

San Francisco Police Want to Be Allowed to Kill People With Robots

San Francisco Police Can Now Kill People With Robots

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Landlords. Most of us have to deal with them. They can be nosy, weird, invasive, and lazy. The best kind of landlord tends to be one that’s hands off. Well what if I told you that you can look forward to a bright future of automated landlords. Robot landlords tending their rental properties with a cool and calloused algorithmic hand. That impersonal future is here. Now.

This week on Cyber, Nick Keppler stops by to talk about the rise of automated landlords. Keppler is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, and—of course—VICE. His latest at Motherboard is Robot Landlords Are Buying Up Houses.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Robot Landlords Are Buying Up Houses

Among the Landlords

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We have to talk about Elon Musk. It’s fun to make fun of him, and whatever he’s doing at Twitter certainly looks like the weird flailing of a man who doesn’t know how to run a company. But let’s take Musk seriously for an hour or so. He is the richest man in the world. He has big dreams and some of the resources to achieve them. The Pentagon is paying him for rocket launches. Starlink works and has been instrumental in the war in Ukraine.

So who is Elon Musk and why do we care so much? His detractors see only a shitposter who made some great business bets. His fans see him as a messianic figure, a superhero who will lead us into a new golden age of technology.

But what’s the truth? Is it somewhere in between? The answer isn’t that simple.

On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard managing editor Jordan Pearson sits down to help us think through the bizarre geopolitical importance of Twitter’s new CEO.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Twitter Employees Call Elon Musk’s Bluff

Twitter Employees on Visas Can’t Just Quit

Elon Musk Is Creating His Own Reality

SpaceX Was Born Because Elon Musk Wanted to Grow Plants on Mars

Elon Musk's Tech Has Geopolitical Clout. Things Are Going to Get Weird

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch and YouTube. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

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We’ve all seen the videos. Those viral townhall meetings where the community gathers to give its feedback to city managers on this or that subject. Too often a crank with a microphone stands before a panel of local political operators and talks at length about something bizarre and hyper specific. Sometimes they get abusive. There’s yelling, tears, grandstanding, and often nothing changes.

It wasn’t always this way and there might be a better way to do it. On this episode of CYBER, Motherboard Senior Writer Aaron Gordon takes us through the history of “community feedback” and why it has to change.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Thank You For Your Feedback

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Have you heard about Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX? FTX was the second largest crypto currency exchange in the world and Bankman-Fried was the guy who ran it. He was a young genius, people said. He practiced something called “effective altruism,” gave away money to people on the street, played video games, and was predicted to be the world’s first trillionaire.

Now he’s bankrupt, FTX is in ruins and large amounts of crypto seem to keep shifting around with no explanation. So who was Bankman-Fried? Why did everyone think he was a genius? And how did FTX seemingly make billions of dollars in wealth evaporate overnight.

On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard staff writer Edward Ongweso Jr. tries to answers those questions.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX Crypto Empire Is Officially Bankrupt

Sam Bankman-Fried Was Supposed to Be Different. He Wasn't.

FTX Founder: ‘I Fucked Up’

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch and YouTube. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show. 

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Without sex there would be no internet. From the moment the servers spun up, users were trying to figure out how to use instant connection to pleasures themselves and each other. The history of sex and the internet are intertwined. And what feels like new problems in the space: banking woes, hate speech, harassment, and moral panics about children are all much much older than you think.

That’s the subject of the new book How Sex Changed the Internet. It’s out on November 15 and it’s by Motherboard Senior Editor Samantha Cole. She’s here with us today to talk about breasts, BBS’, boy’s clubs, and the broad strokes of the culture war.

Buy Sam’s Book Here

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We’re living through the end of something. Facebook is the site where your older family shares racist memes, Twitter seems only capable of talking about itself, and Instagram can’t compete with TikTok. What started with Friendster and MySpace, social media, once felt like a totalizing on the internet. Now it’s dying.

According to Motherboard writer Edward Ongweso Jr, social media isn’t dying. It’s already dead. So what monsters struggle now to be born?

Stories discussed in this episode:

Social Media Is Dead

At SXSW, A Pathetic Tech Future Struggles to Be Born

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Have you tried going to a concert recently? What about a stadium show for a popular comedian? What did it cost? How was the Ticketmaster experience? Like everything else, the price of live event tickets is on the rise.

But the reasons why aren’t as simple as inflation and the economy. Outrageous ticket prices are all about a business monopoly using an algorithm to outflank the secondary market.

It’s a surreal story and here to tell it is Motherboard editor-in-chief Jason Koebler. 

Stories discussed in this episode:

Blink-182 Tickets Are So Expensive Because Ticketmaster Is a Disastrous Monopoly and Now Everyone Pays Ticket Broker Prices

The Man Who Broke Ticketmaster

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch and YouTube. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show. 

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For almost two decades, Facebook has dominated headlines and the lives of its users. It’s been blamed for genocides, pointed to as a vector of disinformation, and depressed you as you scrolled past high school acquaintances that seem to be doing so much better than you. 

But now its founder Mark Zuckerberg is obsessed with a virtual world no one wants, the company’s stock is down 70 percent of its peak and it has lost $800 billion of its market capitalization.

Are we finally witnessing the end of Facebook?

On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard staff writer Edward Ongweso Jr. stops by to try to answer the question. 

Stories discussed in this episode:

Facebook’s Monopoly Is Imploding Before Our Eyes

Elon Musk’s First Days as Twitter Owner: Conspiracies, Chaos, and Desperation

For Much of the World, Facebook Going Down Is a Disaster, Not a Joke

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch and YouTube. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show. 

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The killer robots are here and they’re not going away. 

We’ve all seen footage of the cute robot dogs stumbling around with weapons strapped to their back, and loitering munitions (or so-called “suicide drones”) have become a fixture on the battlefield in Ukraine.

There’s a general fear in the air that the near future will be populated by semi-autonomous killing machines. But killer robots have been here a long time. Did you know one of the first aerial drones was deployed more than 100 years ago? Did you know cops have already used a robot to kill a suspect? Did you know the Netherlands has already deployed robots on the ground equipped with machine guns?

Kelsey Atherton knows, and he’s here to tell us all about it. Atherton is a military tech writer specializing in robots, nukes, and other terrible futures. He’s written for Motherboard before and his substack is Wars of Future Past.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Robot Dog Maker Boston Dynamics Pledges Not to Let Its Robots Kill You

Robot Dog With RPG Strapped to Its Back Demoed at Russian Arms Fair

Police Outsourcing Human Interaction With Homeless People to Boston Dynamics’ Robot Dog

The Netherlands Has Deployed NATO’s First Killer Robot Ground Vehicles

Robot Dog Not So Cute With Submachine Gun Strapped to Its Back

Hacker Finds Kill Switch for Submachine Gun–Wielding Robot Dog

​It's Going to Be Okay

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America and political violence go together like George Lincoln Rockwell and a corncob pipe. There is a growing movement in the U.S., one that’s spreading online and probably in some of your neighborhoods. Far right extremist movements have a deepy history in America and there’s a new podcast from VICE that explores that history.

It’s called American Terror and it’s hosted by a familiar voice: VICE news correspondent and founding host of Cyber Ben Makuch. He stopped by Cyber to talk about the show, UFOs, and Dan Carlin.

Listen to American Terror now on Spotify.

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We’ve all gotten a little too involved in a video game. I’ve talked repeatedly about how I’ve gotten lost in trying to complete maps in open world games like Assassin’s Creed. And there’s a million stories out there about kids who spent all their parents' money on upgrades in Farmville. But when I say the words State of Survival or Game of Thrones: Conquest, what comes to mind? Crappy ads on Facebook? Weird looking games that are obvious money pits? Yes, but there’s something a little more insidious going on. It’s an evolution of the old addictive mobile game formula. One that’s generated a new lawsuit.

On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard Senior Editor Maxwell Strachan comes on to talk about the new era of mobile games, the price of addiction, and the people suing for false advertising.

Stories discussed in this episode:

‘Game of Thrones: Conquest’ and ‘State of Survival’ Players Say They Felt Addicted and Pressured To Spend

CYBER: How Corporations and Governments Use Games to Control Us

Confessions of a Semi-Reformed Video Game Completionist

B.F. Skinner on his beef with Noam Chomsky

On Chomsky's Appraisal of Skinner's Verbal Behavior: A Half Century of Misunderstanding

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch and YouTube. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show. 

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On this episode of Cyber we talk about an old technology that suddenly feels very new. The bomb. That’s right, this episode is all about nuclear weapons. Thanks to Moscow’s war in Ukraine and Putin’s implicit and explicit threats to use them should Russian territory be threatened, everyone is afraid of nuclear weapons once again. Able Archer? Passé. Cuban Missile Crisis? Old news. These days it’s all about hypersonics, tactical nukes, and even cruise missiles powered by a nuclear engine.

At least that’s the claim.

On this episode of Cyber, the Arms Control Wonk himself, Jeffrey Lewis, comes on to answer all your burning questions about nuclear weapons. Lewis is a professor at the Middlebury Institute, a member of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, and the host of the Arms Control Wonk podcast.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Is There a Threat of Nuclear War with Russia? Experts Weigh In.

Putin Puts Russia’s Nuclear Deterrent Forces on High Alert

Putin Demonstrates New Missiles With Visualization of Nukes Hitting Mar-a-Lago

Nuclear War Anxiety Is Back. Here’s How to Manage It.

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch and YouTube. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show. 

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Apps have made our life so convenient haven’t they? With the push of a button you can order Postmates, book an Airbnb, or even call an Uber. But what happens when the apps stop taking your calls? What happens when they shut you out completely?

It’s happening more and more. In a bid to increase user safety, companies like Airbnb and Uber are turning to third parties to run background checks for them. A lot of it is automated and the background checkers make a lot of mistakes. So what happens if you’ve been a five star guest on Airbnb but a decades old run in with the cops suddenly makes you a pariah?

Not much, it turns out.

On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard senior editor Samantha Cole comes on to talk about Inflection, the company running background checks for Uber, Airbnb and DraftKings.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Banished for an Unleashed Dog: Airbnb Bans Bewilder Guests and Hosts

‘Consumers Get Screwed’: Airbnb’s and Uber’s Background-Check Company Keeps Getting Sued

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch and YouTube. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show. 

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Do you ever feel like you’re being played? Like the people who run the world have got you on a treadmill that’s feeding you just enough rewards to keep going. Gold stars on your attendance sheet at elementary school. Apps that encourage you to run by pretending you’re fleeing zombies. Bosses that keep track of everyone’s progress in a public spreadsheet, pitting employees against each other.

As video games have gotten more popular, the world of flesh and blood has adopted some of its aspects. Not all of them are good. Gamification is here, all around us, and the powers that be are using it to keep us in line.

On this episode of Cyber ex-neuroscientist, current game developer, and best-selling author Adrian Hon talks about gamification with us. His newest book is You’ve Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All.

Stories discussed in this episode:

What Alternate Reality Games Teach Us About the Dangerous Appeal of QAnon

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Hacks are increasing but the hackers are not necessarily getting more sophisticated. What do Twitter, Twilio, and Uber all have in common? They were all hacked by, in part, a conversation. In all three cases, the hack was helped along by social engineering. Someone contacted an employee of the company and tricked them into giving up the keys to the company. It doesn’t matter how fancy your 2FA system is if an employee is just gonna give up their SMS codes to some rando on the phone.

But worry not. There are ways to protect yourself and your company against such attacks. With me today to work through it all is Rachel Tobac. Tobac is a hacker and the CEO of SocialProof Security, a company that aims to get your organization politely paranoid.

She also, coincidentally, just published a really amazing video that dramatizes a lot about what we’re going to talk about today. You can find it on Twitter @racheltobac.

Stories discussed in this episode:

The Uber Hack Shows Push Notification 2FA Has a Downside: It’s Too Annoying

How a Third-Party SMS Service Was Used to Take Over Signal Accounts

Hackers Convinced Twitter Employee to Help Them Hijack Accounts

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show. 

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Chess. Chess. Chess. You, the audience, quite literally asked for it. It’s the scandal that just won’t quit. On September 4 at a live Chess Tournament in St. Louis, chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen lost in a massive upset to young chess wiz Hans Niemann. This was not supposed to happen and almost immediately accusations and revelations about cheating have gotten wilder, involving AI driven cheating engines and buttplugs.

Throughout it all, Motherboard editor-in-chief Jason Koebler has kept pushing the story, watching every moment, and now he’s got a big scoop.

Stories discussed on this episode:

‘I Can’t Believe It’: Magnus Carlsen Resigns After One Move in Chess Rematch With Hans Niemann

Magnus Carlsen Finally Speaks on Chess Cheating Scandal, Sows Even More Chaos

Magnus Carlsen: Hans Niemann ‘Has Cheated More—and More Recently—Than He Has Publicly Admitted’

Chess Grandmaster Maxim Dlugy Admitted to Cheating on Chess.com, Emails Show

Did Hans Neimann Cheat at Chess With a Sex Toy? This Coder Is Attempting to Find Out.

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show. 

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AI art has gotten wildly popular over the past year. Programs like Midjourney and Dall-E are generating incredible images and incredible controversy. But these programs don’t exist in a vacuum. AI’s require billions of images to learn how and what to draw. Where are they getting those pictures? They’re hoovering them up on the internet. A place full of child porn, ISIS execution videos, and non-consensual adult images. With AI it’s all garbage in, garbage out. So who controls this data and is there anything we can do about it?

On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard writer Chloe Xiang walks us through the ins and outs of the AI trained on ISIS execution images.

Stories discussed in this episode:

ISIS Executions and Non-Consensual Porn Are Powering AI Art

Amazon Driver Fired for Posting Photo of Customer’s Dildo to Reddit

'The Silence of My Critics Speaks for Itself:' Hans Niemann Says He Is Being Unfairly Attacked in Chess Scandal

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You ever feel like somebody’s watching you? Well, on the internet, it’s often true. Every move you make on the internet generates reams of data that ISPs and data brokers sell on to on to a ton of people who may want to take a look. It’s a big business. One we don’t often see the inside of.

One of the companies buying up all that data is Team Cymru who watches over all of it with a tool it calls Augury. Who buys Augury? We’ve just learned a lot of agencies within the federal government. Cyber Command, the Army, the Navy, are all using Augury to paw through internet traffic. But what, exactly, are they looking for? And what can they even see?

Stories discussed on this episode:

Revealed: US Military Bought Mass Monitoring Tool That Includes Internet Browsing, Email Data

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show. 

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Groups on Telegram that used to primarily be interested in taking over people’s phones and online accounts have changed tactics. Now, they’re selling violence. And to cap off the week, a hacker we don’t know much about was able to steal the credentials of an Uber employee and access the company's back end.

On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard staff writers Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai and Joseph Cox walk us through the latest in the world of cybersecurity.

Stories discussed on this episode:

Firebombs and Shootings: The Rise of IRL Harassment and Violence as a Service

LAPSUS$: How a Sloppy Extortion Gang Became One of the Most Prolific Hacking Groups

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

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This week on Cyber we’re going deep into recent stories of unidentified flying objects and Chess. The Pentagon has gotten big into investigating what it calls unidentified aerial phenomenon and a chess champion has been accused of cheating but the exact phenomenon he’s accused of remains unidentified.

With me today to walk through all of this is Motherboard’s lovely editor-in-chief Jason Koebler. 

Stories discussed in this episode:

Congress Admits UFOs Not ‘Man-Made,’ Says ‘Threats’ Increasing ‘Exponentially’

Was This Viral UFO Photo a Hoax Generated By an AI?

Navy Says All UFO Videos Classified, Releasing Them ‘Will Harm National Security’

The Chess World Is Absolutely Losing It Over Cheating Allegations After Massive Upset

'The Silence of My Critics Speaks for Itself:' Hans Niemann Says He Is Being Unfairly Attacked in Chess Scandal

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

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Today on Cyber we’ve got a special presentation: We’re talking about Motherboard’s science fiction short story collection Terraform one last time. This week’s episode is a recording of a live roundtable discussion with Cory Doctorow and Geoff Manaugh—both of whom have short stories in the collection—and Terraform editors Claire L. Evans and Brian Merchant.

Want to learn the secret history of the Luddites? Find out if corporations can be bought off? Learn what it’s like to work with Netflix? Well, stay tuned.

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It seems like the Earth’s billionaires are desperate to escape the planet. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are looking to outer space. Mark Zuckerberg is looking to the inner space of virtual reality. So many billionaires are buying up land and luxury survival bunkers in New Zealand that it’s hard to keep track.

Do they know something we don’t? Or do they just have the money to act on fears they themselves were instrumental in creating?

Here today to help me answer that question is Douglas Rushkoff. Rushkoff is a media theorist and author. His newest book is out on September 6. It’s called Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

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Woe to those who live in the path of a hypercane. What’s a hypercane? I’m glad you asked. In a frighteningly possible future you’ll be hearing more about them. As the planet warms and the climate changes, we’re in for all kinds of new and bizarre extreme weather systems. It’s a hurricane so big and so powerful it extends through several states.

Today on Cyber, we’ve got something special. Another short story from Motherboard’s first book: Terraform. Terraform editor Brian Merchant and special guest Eric Holthaus come on Cyber to discuss how we personalize the climate disaster we’re all living through. Holthaus is a meteorologist, climate journalist, and the founder of Currently—a weather service built for folks on the front line of the climate emergency. He’s here to read a bit of his Terraform story ‘Hypercane.’

Stories discussed in this episode: 

Hypercane

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A new study in Nature Food has revealed, once again, the unprecedented danger of nuclear weapons. Built on the foundation of decades of research, it’s about the climate change and global famine that would follow even a limited nuclear exchange.

The models are a terrifying warning. A limited war between Pakistan and India that uses just three percent of the world’s nuclear weapons could kill a third of the Earth’s population.

In this special edition of Cyber, we talk about the study, its implications, and what we can do to avoid tragedy. Here with me to have that discussion is one of the author’s behind the study, Rutgers University climatologist Alan Robock.

Robock will lay out what he and his colleagues found in just a moment, to help us understand what actions we should take is Dr. Ruth Mitchell from the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and Alicia Sanders-Zakre from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

Stories discussed in this episode:

A Nuclear War Between the U.S. and Russia Would Starve 5 Billion People

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Drone. The word has come to mean so many things. An eye in the sky. A hobbyist flying toy. A dangerous voyeur. A weapon of war. An enforcer. A worker. But a worker that’s maybe not as soulless as the name implies. As AI gets more sophisticated and the subroutines become rote… might it be possible to convert the electronic oppressor?

Today on Cyber, we’ve got something special. Motherboard has published a book! It’s called Terraform and it’s out now. It’s a collection of short stories about the near future and the dystopian present. With me today on the show are the book’s editors, Claire L. Evans and Brian Merchant as well as special guest Sarah Gailey. They’re the author of the new novel Just Like Home and the Terraform story “Drones to Ploughshares.”

Terraform’s stories are all about possible futures. “Drones to Ploughshares” is a window into one of those worlds.’

Terraform is out now! Buy it here.

Stories discussed in this episode: 

Drones to Ploughshares

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Some days, it feels like all you can do is watch worlds burn.

This is especially true for the millions of people living in hospice care. Health in the U.S. isn’t what it used to be. The population is aging and it’s not just the Baby Boomers. If you think Millennials will age more gracefully than their parents, well, I have a counselor I’d like you to speak with. It’s specially trained for the job and It knows all about you. It really does keep the cost of healthcare down.

Today on Cyber, we’ve got something special. Motherboard has published a book. It’s called Terraform and it’s out now. It’s a collection of short stories about the near future and the dystopian present. With me today on the show are the book’s editors, Claire L. Evans and Brian Merchant as well as special guest Robin Sloan. He’s the author of the new novel The Suitcase Clone and … the Terraform story “The Counselor.”

Terraform’s stories are all about possible futures. “The Counselor” is a window into one of those worlds.

Terraform is out now. Buy it here.

Stories discussed on this episode:

The Counselor

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

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We all get them. We all hate them. Spam. There was a time, long ago, when it was just your mailbox and your inbox that got hit with superfluous ads and scams. But now? My phone rings all day long and all of the calls are spam. All of them. If you’re not on my contact list, I’m not picking up. And the texts have gotten much much worse. Everyday is a new offering and every ping is spam.

Did you know that most of that spam is actually illegal and that you, yes you, can sue the companies sending it out and make a few hundred bucks. On this episode of Cyber we sit down with a man who did just that. David Weekly sued a spam texter and got $1,200. Here’s how he did it.

Stories discussed in this episode:

This Guy Sued a Spam Texter and Got $1,200 (and You Can Too)

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Some days, it feels like all you can do is watch worlds burn.

This is especially true in the desperate small towns that pocket the parts of America some derisively call ‘Flyover Country.’

Today on Cyber, we’ve got something special. Motherboard is publishing a book! It’s called Terraform and it drops on August 16. It’s a collection of short stories about the near future and the dystopian present. With me today on the show are the book’s editors, Claire L. Evans and Brian Merchant as well as special guest Tim Maughan. He’s the author of the novel Infinite Detail and … the Terraform story Flyover Country.

Terraform’s stories are all about possible futures. Flyover Country is a window into one of those worlds. One that may seem unpleasantly familiar.

Terraform is out on August 16. Buy it here.

Stories discussed on this episode:

Flyover Country

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Last month, a hacker posted a trove of stolen documents online detailing the weird internal struggles of a little gaming company called Roblox. If you don’t know what Roblox is, just ask any child in America and they’ll explain it to you. The hacked documents contained fascinating insights into how gaming companies whose product depends on player freedom and creativity must navigate the treacherous waters of children, free speech, China, mass shootings, and content moderation. It’s a weird story where a child driven internet sandbox can lead to troubling and weird questions about genocide roleplay.

Today on Cyber, Motherboard Staff Writer Joseph Cox comes on to talk about the hack and what we learned from it.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Hacker Posts Internal Roblox Employee Documents Online

Revealed: Documents Show How Roblox Planned to Bend to Chinese Censorship

Leaked Documents Reveal How Roblox Handles Grooming and Mass Shooting Simulators

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

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A lot of stuff happened on the internet this week. Strange orbs fell from the sky and landed in Mexico. Thousands watched online as Nancy Pelosi’s plane slowly made its way to Taiwan. And the International Atomic Energy Agency called out Russia for making Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant a front in its war in Ukraine.

It’s a grab bag episode of Cyber and we’re gonna get into it all with Motherboard editor-in-chief Jason Koebler.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Fighting Around Europe’s Largest Power Plant Is ‘Out of Control,’ UN’s Nuke Chief Warns

How Online Flight Trackers Have Helped People Follow Nancy Pelosi, Taylor Swift, and Russian Oligarchs’ Private Flights

Space Junk Crashing All Over the World, Upsetting Everyone

Mysterious Metallic Orb Falls on Mexico, May Contain ‘Valuable Information,’ Meteorologist Says

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

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Alex Jones, the slowly bloating Texan broadcaster, is currently on trial in Austin for peddling conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook massacre. Jones has already lost—the trial will eventually set damages. 

Amid this, Jones’ companies are filing for bankruptcy and a new documentary about him is playing the festival circuit. He says this is all about the First Amendment. In a way, he’s right. Defamation cases are about the First Amendment. 

On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard Senior Staff Writer Anna Merlan comes on to discuss all things Alex Jones. Merlan has written extensively about Jones and is following the trial for Motherboard.

Stories discussed in this episode:

As Damages Trial Begins, Alex Jones’ Lawyers Fight for His Financial Life

InfoWars Cannot Stop Covering Its Own Damages Trial

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

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If you haven’t heard, there’s a hot new condiment on the market that’s gone viral on TikTok. It’s called Pink Sauce and it’s been at the center of several controversies over the past few weeks.

The sauce has been accused of making people sick, being a rip off of other condiments, and lying about its nutritional information. On this episode of Cyber we’re going to try to answer the question: why does everyone ok TikTok seem to care about this pepto-bismol colored goop?

With us today to talk all things Pink Sauce is Motherboard Intern and TikTok master Jules Roscoe.

Stories discussed in this episode:

‘They Accused Me of Poisoning the Nation:’ Chef Pii's Viral Pink Sauce Has Turned Into a TikTok Nightmare

Viral Pink Sauce Comes With Lengthy Terms and Conditions

Let Me Eat the TikTok 'Pink Sauce'

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

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We don’t get a lot of feel good stories on Cyber. It’s often a podcast about hacking and tribulation. So we thought we’d do something a little different and tell the story of someone who fought back against abuse and won. Nicole Gililland is a former nursing student who began to experience discrimination when people at the nursing college she was attended began to dig into her past.

Gililland was just trying to get a nursing degree, but the faculty at Southwestern Oregon Community College decided she wasn’t fit because she’d formerly performed in porn. She sued. She won. A jury awarded her $1.7 million in damages and the precedent set could have far reaching consequences.

On this episode of Cyber, Gililland sits down with Motherboard senior editor Samantha Cole to talk about her case and her future.

Stories discussed in this episode:

How a Former Porn Performer Sued Her School for Discrimination—and Won

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

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What do an iPad, the Department of Homeland Security, and heated seats in a BMW all have in common? Motherboard staff writer Joseph Cox has written about all of them.

In this episode of Cyber, it’s a JC potpourri. First, how exactly does the Department of Homeland Security track phones across the country? Then we’ll get to the bottom of that viral story about BMW selling subscriptions to heated seats and what hackers might have to say about it. Finally, we’ll get to the bottom of JC’s new iPad situation and finally answer the question: why doesn’t he have a smartphone?

Stories discussed in this episode:

Documents Show DHS Tracks Smartphones Across the Country

Apple Killed My Precious iPod. Can an iPad Mini Be My New Everyday Messaging Device?

BMW Wants to Charge for Heated Seats. These Grey Market Hackers Will Fix That.

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

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The war in Ukraine isn’t just happening on the ground, it’s also happening in cyberspace. It’s under reported and little understood, but just as the resilience of Urkainian’s kinetic defense is grinding against Russia, so too is the war online.

Which is funny, because Russia is supposed to be good at this. At least … that’s what we all used to think. Hell, maybe it even used to be true. But now a team of volunteer hackers called the Ukraine IT Army is defending Kyiv and striking back against Moscow.

This week on Cyber, Motherboard staff writer Lorenzo Franchesci-Biccherai takes us into the Ukraine IT Army.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Inside Ukraine’s Decentralized Cyber Army

Russia Released a Ukrainian App for Hacking Russia That Was Actually Malware

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

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Let’s talk about that hot new topic screaming from the lips of Tech’s hottest billionaires: birth rates.

For some time, Elon Musk’s pinned tweet was about the declining birth rates in the United States. A man of conviction, Musk has sired at least ten children. Now Marc Andreesen of Andreessen Horowitz is in on the act. He recently went on Joe Rogan and had a wide ranging conversation that covered birth rates and eugenics.

So why are some of the richest people alive obsessed with the U.S. having more kids? On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard staff writer Edward Ongweso Jr. comes on to talk about longtermism and America’s history of being weird about who gets to have kids.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Why Are Elon Musk and Marc Andreesen Obsessed With Birth Rates?

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For years criminal organizations around the world were buying a special phone called Anom. The pitch was that it was completely anonymous and secure, a way for criminals to do business without authorities watching over their shoulder. 

It turned out that the whole thing was an elaborate honeypot and that the FBI and law enforcement agencies around the world were listening in. They’d help develop the phones themselves.

The fallout from that revelation is ongoing and, here at Motherboard, we’ve just learned how the phones work. On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard Senior Staff Writer Joseph Cox comes on to discuss the code that powered the Anom phone.

Stories discussed in this episode:

This is the Code the FBI Used to Wiretap the World

We Got the Phone the FBI Secretly Sold to Criminals

FBI's Backdoored Anom Phones Secretly Harvested GPS Data Around the World

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You can’t scroll 1 inch on the internet these days without someone trying to sell you something. Facebook and Google rake in millions of dollars on advertising alone. When we talk about Ad Tech, those are the names that move through our mind. Not many people think about Disney. But they should.

On today’s Cyber, Motherboard staff writer Joseph Cox comes on to talk about how Disney became a big player in the digital world of advertising. We begin with a set of surreal videos that use the Muppets and Star Wars to talk directly to advertisers. 

Want to hear Muppets extol the virtues of targeted advertising? Stick around.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Leaked Videos Show Disney Is the Biggest Ad Tech Giant You've Never Heard Of

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

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On June 30, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling that will have far reaching consequences about the power of the federal government to fight climate change. How did the landmark ruling even end up in front of the Justices, why did they decide to rule on it, and what will the consequences be for the environment and the country?

On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard Staff Writer Aaron Gordon sits down to answer all these questions and do more than a little ranting.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Supreme Court Kneecaps Federal Government’s Ability to Fight Climate Change

Democrats Are Not Going to 'Vote Harder,' Primaries Show

Here's What America Looked Like Before the EPA

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The Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, upsetting decades of precedent and ushering in a weird new world of conflicting laws and a lack of bodily autonomy for many women in the country. 

It’s a decision that will affect life in the U.S. in ways we’re only starting to comprehend. This week on Cyber we’re going to look at one small piece of all this: tech, data, and censorship. 

With me today is Motherboard Senior Editor Samantha Cole. She’s been working on a number of stories about period tracking apps and data and she’s here to walk us through how the Roe decision is not just a blow against bodily autonomy, but also against privacy.

Stories in this episode:

The #1 Period Tracker on the App Store Will Hand Over Data Without a Warrant

Here’s What Period Tracking Apps Say They Do With Your Data

Tech Companies Won't Say If They’ll Give Cops Abortion Data

Facebook Is Banning People Who Say They Will Mail Abortion Pills

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What do landlords talk about behind closed doors, among other landlords? Motherboard staff writer and Cyber host Matthew Gault attended in St. Louis recently. Landlords traded gossip, talked about raising rents, and tried to sell each on books and online classes. Outside of the convention, rents hit record medians, the COVID moratorium is ending, and a lot of tenants simply can’t afford to put a roof over their head.

On this week’s episode of Cyber, Motherboard editor-in-chief Jason Koebler interviews Matthew about what it’s like to attend the 21st Annual Mr. Landlord.com National Landlord Convention.

Stories discussed on this episode:

Among the Landlords

Where People Pretend to Be 'Landchads' and Make Fun of 'Rentoids'

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

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Reply guys. Maybe you’ve got one, maybe you are one. If you’re a public person online, and especially if you’re a woman, you tend to attract a few fans or detractors who respond to every single thing you post. Sometimes those interactions can be obnoxious. Sometimes, they can be so much worse.

Today’s Cyber is about a reply guy from hell, a person who—for almost two decades—has used the internet to wage sustained harassment campaigns against multiple women. It’s a bizarre and disturbing story that involves Twitter DMs, revenge porn, and Animal Crossing.

On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard Senior Staff Writer Anna Merlan walks us through the story of the man who has been harassing women online for almost 20 years.

Stories discussed on this episode:

These Women Say One Man Terrorized Them Online for Years. Then, They Decided to Band Together

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

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Artificial intelligence. It’s in your headlines and on your social media feed. AIs like Midjourney and DALL-E have filled my Twitter feed with algorithmically generated nightmare images of Tony Soprano as a Roman Emperor and Bigbird participating in the January 6 riots.

At the same time, the press has become enamored with the story of Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer who the company let go after Lemoine insisted the LaMDA chatbot was sentient. Are we at the beginning of the AI apocalypse? Have our machines finally become sentient?

Simply: no. And conversations about AI outpacing human artists and chatbots becoming sentient are part of a tired news cycle around AI. They also mask the actual dangers of the technology we should be watching out for.

On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard Senior Editor Janus Rose walks us through the real and imagined terrors of Artificial Intelligence.

Stories discussed on this week’s episode:

Technologists Are Using AI to ‘Expand’ Famous Works of Art

Google's AI Isn’t Sentient, But It Is Biased and Terrible

The AI That Draws What You Type Is Very Racist, Shocking No One

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

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Crypto is the wild west. Decentralized finance is the purview of the rich and the risk-taker. There’s millions to be had, but it’s easy—often too easy—to lose everything. If you read Motherboard you know that big and wild hacks are common. Maiar went offline recently after hackers stole $113 million from it. The Osmosis exchange just lost $5 million to hackers. And those are just the stories Motherboard reported on this week.

If you’re an investor, an exchange, or a private holder, who do you turn to when your crypto is being stolen? The authorities are so far behind it’s funny. No, remember, this is the wild west. Sometimes the only thing that can handle a black hat is a white hat.

Today we’re gonna meet one of the vigilante white hat hackers who saves crypto from thieves… by stealing it before they can.

With me today is Motherboard Senior Staff writer Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, who wrote about the phenomenon on the site and LP, one of the white hats who hacks millions in crypto before thieves can get to it.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Meet the Vigilantes Who Hack Millions in Crypto to Save It From Thieves

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The future is here, if you can pay for it. From NFTs, to web3, to virtual worlds, it seems like everyone has a pitch about what the future looks like and how we get there. For those involved, it’s a frenzied world of big money and massive opportunity. From the outside looking in, a lot of it looks like a massive scam.

When I was a kid, the future meant flying cars and virtual worlds of our own creation. Now people are telling me it means clunky headsets, pictures of cartoon apes, and decentralized platforms that make absolutely no sense but will make those involved filthy rich.

What the hell is going on?

With me today is Motherboard managing editor Jordan Pearson and special guest Jackson Palmer. Palmer is perhaps most famous for creating the Doge coin, but he’s also a musician, programer, and host of the new show Griftonomics.

Griftonomics is available in iTunes and YouTube.

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

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Discord. The popular chat app was once the humble home of gamers who were tired of paying for Ventrilo and Teamspeak servers. Now, it’s so much more. The crypto people have come and it doesn’t look like they’re going anywhere.

From the Bored Ape Yacht Club to the next alt-coin with no backing, any project related to the blockchain probably has a space on Discord. But Discord was never built to be a place where people gathered together to manifest complex financial schemes and, because of that, it’s rife with scammers, grifters, and hackers. 

On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard Senior Staff Writer Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai walks us through the perils of using Discord as a financial chat app.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Discord Is the World’s Most Important Financial Messenger, and a Hotbed for Scammers

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In 2018, the Camp Fire swept through California. It was the deadliest in the state’s history, destroying more than 18,000 buildings and killing 85 people. The town of Paradise all but burned to the ground at the time. Four years later, Paradise is in the midst of a housing boom. New homes are everywhere as people, some of them who lost their homes in the Camp Fire, return to the region.

There’s no guarantee that another fire won’t sweep through the region. So why are people flocking to the area?

On today’s episode of Cyber, Motherboard Staff Writer Aaron Gordon sits down to talk about what’s going on in Paradise.. Gordon is newly back from California where he chased some dogs through some forests and talked to a few of the town’s residents.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Paradise Burned to the Ground. Now It’s Another Hot Housing Market

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

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On May 24, several news outlets reported on the internal workings of a Chinese run Uyghur internment camp in Xinjiang. The reports included detailed blueprints of the camp’s interiors, classified speeches from officials, and the personal information of police officers.

An anonymous source hacked the information and got it out of China and into the hands of journalists. It’s part of a recent trend in resurgent hacktivism. 

On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard Staff Writer Joseph Cox walks us through the recent hack and what it’s like when journalists work with hackers.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Hacker Leaks Mountain of Files From Inside Xinjiang Camps

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The atom. For a few brief years in the middle of the 20th century, America and the world was cowed by the awesome possibility and terrifying reality of nuclear energy. Nuclear power had the potential to revolutionize the world but nuclear bombs could destroy it. But still … for a brief moment it seemed like nuclear energy would save the world. Then came Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and The China Syndrome. America fell out of love with nuclear energy.

That might be changing. Climate change and scientific advances might just be the shot in the arm the flagging nuclear energy industry needs. But did the dangers actually go away?

That’s the subject of the excellent podcast Wild Thing. Its third season is all about the shifting landscape of nuclear energy. It’s comprehensive, excellent, and it’s produced and hosted by former NPR editor Laura Krantz. 

On this episode of Cyber, Krantz sits down with Matthew to discuss Going Nuclear.

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The image is now iconic. An arctic wolf fursona in a Starbucks smock. Stance set wide. A sign in his hand held high that reads “UNION YES!”

This was Michael Vestigo dressed in his Fursona as Apollo, a former Starbucks employee in Overland Park, Kansas. Why former? The company fired him for “displaying violent and threatening behavior” after he participated in a walkout of his location as part of a unionization effort.

Vestigo is fighting to get his job back and he’s not the only person Starbucks has retaliated against for trying to form a union. As Apollo, he’s become a symbol of a movement that’s sweeping the country. 

Apollo joined us on today’s episode of Cyber to answer your burning questions about Unions and Starbucks.

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This bonus episode of Cyber is sponsored by Command Line Heroes. If you like Cyber, you’re going to like Command Line Heroes. It’s an original podcast from Red Hat where listeners hear epic true tales of how developers, programmers, hackers, geeks, and open source rebels are revolutionizing the technology landscape.

It’s an award winning show that’s been running for nine seasons. Every season has a theme and season 9 is all about the dark side of programming. Botnets, logic bombs, and—of course—ransomware. If you’ve ever wanted to know about the origins of some of the things you hate most on the internet, this season of Command Line Heroes has you covered.

With Matthew on this show are Command Line Heroes producers Kim Huang and Johan Philippine.

Command Line Heroes Is Available wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Some days I think that maybe we’re not all gonna make it. It’s been a bad week for cryptocurrency and, as of this recording, it’s only Tuesday. Bitcoin is down. Ethereum down. Stablecoin seems not so stable. The NFT market is on fire. There’s copium all around, panicked posters, and soothing souls advising everyone to buy the dip.

But won’t that just exacerbate the problem? Won’t that just delay what people outside the crypto space have been waiting to see happen: the great crypto crash.

On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard Managing Editor Jordan Perason is here to answer all our burning crypto questions.

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Facebook’s biggest strength is quickly becoming its largest headache. For years, Facebook has survived by tracking every little thing its users do and selling that on to everyone. But now a slew of regulations across the globe are looking to crack down on the social media site and, according to leaked documents, Facebook has no idea how to get compliant. Worse, the social media giant has no idea where any given piece of data goes once it enters its ecosystem.

On this episode of Cyber, we sit down with Motherboard Senior Staff Writer Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai to talk about the regulation “tsunami” facing the social media site.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Facebook Doesn’t Know What It Does With Your Data, Or Where It Goes: Leaked Document

Lawmakers Call For Better Facebook User Data Oversight

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Your data is valuable. Everything you do online and everywhere you go with your phone is tracked. And there’s a robust market for that data, a market that lets governments and private individuals purchase reams of your personal data. 

What if the CDC wanted to track people’s phones to see if they’re obeying Covid-19 lockdown orders? They can do that. 

What about a private individual paying to track the whereabouts of groups of people who visited Planned Parenthood? Also possible.

On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard Senior Staff Writer Joseph Cox comes on to discuss SafeGraph and the data it’s selling to anyone who is willing to pay.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Data Broker Is Selling Location Data of People Who Visit Abortion Clinics

CDC Tracked Millions of Phones to See If Americans Followed COVID Lockdown Orders

How the U.S. Military Buys Location Data from Ordinary Apps

Leaked Location Data Shows Another Muslim Prayer App Tracking Users

Google Bans Location Data Firm Funded by Former Saudi Intelligence Head

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Elon Musk’s attempts to buy Twitter have sent ripples through the social media platform. There is a story here about panic, the limited reach of social media, and the increasingly fuzzy nature of the private/ public space … but I think all that is a surface level analysis. For me, the more interesting story is the corporate what lies just underneath.

You see, Musk is the richest man not because he invented anything wonderful and world changing. No, he’s rich because he’s good at making money. He’s a businessman first and foremost. Through that lens, the story of the Twitter acquisition becomes one of shitposts and SEC filings, a bizarre fight between tech titans, a rehashing of old corporate techniques like “poison pills” and “hostile takeovers.”

On this episode of Cyber, we sit down with Motherboard features writer and editor Maxwell Strachan. He’s here to answer all your burning questions about Musk’s attempted Twitter takeover.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Twitter Loses Elon Musk the Board Member, Regains Elon Musk the Shitposter

Twitter and Elon Musk Are Now at War

We Spoke to an Old-School Corporate Raider About Elon Musk and Twitter

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Drones are here to stay. The U.S. Military may have pioneered the art of using drones in a war zone, but America’s cops are pushing the tech on the homefront. From the Boston Dynamics dogs taking temperatures in Hawaii to quadcopters patrolling the skies, the cops are very interested in drone tech.

One of the big companies in the field is Skydio. It advertises itself directly to police officers and has cultivated relationships with departments across the country. This week on Cyber, host Matthew Gault and Motherboard Editor-in-Chief Jason Koebler discuss the close relationship between Skydio and America’s police.

Stories discussed in this episode:

When Police Do Marketing for Surveillance Tech Companies

World’s Richest Man Gets What He Wanted (Elon Musk Becomes King Shit of Turd Mountain)

Everything You Need to Know About Ring, Amazon’s Surveillance Camera Company

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Are you using two-factor authentication for all your accounts? Do you have Apple Pay or another service hooked up to a bank card? Well, so do criminals. 

It’s the growth of a scheme Cyber first reported on about six months ago. Thanks to bots that help criminals trick you into giving up your 2FA codes, they're now able to set up links between Apple Pay bank cards. It’s shockingly easy to do and, bizarrely, shockingly hard to stop.

On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard Staff Writer Joseph Cox walks us through how criminals are circumventing 2FA and using Apple Pay to go on spending sprees.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Criminals Abuse Apple Pay in Spending Sprees

The Booming Underground Market for Bots That Steal Your 2FA Codes

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Trains, trains, trains. You might not think of them very often but they make America run. Getting stuff from point A to Point B is more than a full time job. Our world runs on logistical supply chains that are supported, in large part, by freight trains.

But what happens if the people doing those jobs don’t get much sleep? What happens when the company running the trains implements systems that deprive its already weary workforce of much needed Zs?

 

This week on Cyber, Motherboard Senior Staff Writer Aaron Gordon is here to answer all those questions. 

Stories discussed in this episode:

‘The Worst and Most Egregious Attendance Policy’ Is Pushing Railroad Workers to the Brink

Amtrak Is Streaming an Empty Railroad on Twitch to Beef With Freight Rail Companies

‘What Choice Do I Have?’ Freight Train Conductors Are Forced to Work Tired, Sick, and Stressed

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Every week we publish multiple incredible stories on Motherboard. This week there were so many that we couldn’t decide which one we wanted to focus on. So. We’re gonna do something a little different for this episode.

That’s right, we’re going full Cipher. If you’re familiar with the show, Cipher is that infrequent segment we do where we decipher the week’s biggest tech stories. On this episode of Cyber we answer the questions: Is it illegal to run a private Club Penguin server? How is T-Mobile dealing with hackers? And why can’t I get on to the Raid Forums and what happens if you make an illegal trip to North Korea to spread the gospel of the Blockchain.

Here to help sort through these headlines is the man who wrote many of them: Motherboard Staff Writer Joseph Cox.

Stories discussed in this episode:

Cops Arrest 3 People for Running ‘Club Penguin Rewritten’ Beloved by Millions

Law Enforcement Seizes RaidForums, One of the Most Important Hacking Sites

T-Mobile Secretly Bought Its Customer Data from Hackers to Stop Leak. It Failed.

US Extradites Man Who Allegedly Sold Backdoored Phones for the FBI

Ethereum Programmer Jailed for North Korea Trip Wanted to Clone Dogs, Become ‘Crypto Hero’

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Police records reviewed by Motherboard show that, as security experts immediately predicted when the product launched, this technology has been used as a tool to stalk and harass women.

Of the 150 total police reports mentioning AirTags, in 50 cases women called the police because they started getting notifications that their whereabouts were being tracked by an AirTag they didn’t own. Of those, 25 could identify a man in their lives—ex-partners, husbands, bosses—who they strongly suspected planted the AirTags on their cars in order to follow and harass them. Those women reported that current and former intimate partners—the most likely people to harm women overall—are using AirTags to stalk and harass them.

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Close your eyes. Imagine it's 2010. You’ve just learned about something called Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency. You spend $50 and get 50 of the coins, thinking the whole thing is funny. Cut to 2022. What you spent around 50 bucks on in 2010 is now worth 2 million dollars.

There’s just one problem. You need a password to access that 2 million and 2010 was a long time ago. It’s a problem plaguing the world of cryptocurrency: an epidemic of millionaires unable to access their cash. But there are options.

To deal with the problem, a cottage industry of asset recovery specialists has emerged. One is Crypto Asset Recovery, a startup run by a father-son team in New Hampshire.

They are Chris and Charlie Brooks and they are here with me today to talk about the business of breaking in.

Chris and Charlie also appeared on an episode of Motherboard’s TV show Cryptoland, which you can stream at YouTube.com/motherboard.

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For many, playing video games for a living is a dream come true. Whether you’re streaming on Twitch or doing speedruns for charity, there are viable ways to earn a living playing video games. But get NFTs and the blockchain in the mix and, well, you’ve got a whole different system.

Today we’re gonna talk about Axie Infinity, the most popular of the so-called ‘play-to-earn’ games. The promise of Axie and others is that you can earn money simply by playing the game. But how much? Is Axie fun? How easy is it to cash out? And wait … this game has bosses and managers? What the hell is going on?

This week on Cyber, Motherboard Staff Writer Edward Ongweso Jr. is here to help us untangle this hellishly complicated nightmare of “play-to-earn” gaming. His latest on the site is “The Metaverse Has Bosses Too. Meet the ‘Managers’ of Axie Infinity.”

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We’ve got a special presentation on the show for you today, an interview with Yuliana Shemetovets, the spokesperson for a group of ethical hackers going to war with Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. They’re called the Cyber Partisans and they’re responsible for hacks against the Lukashenko regime.

Lukashenko is a die-hard Putin ally who has been in charge of Belarus since 1994. In that time, the country has become more unstable. Protestors have disappeared from the streets and Belarus has allowed Russian troops to move through the country to strike at Ukraine.

The Cyber Partisans have worked behind the scenes to disrupt Lukashenko’s regime. They’ve hacked the Belarusian railway system, which still runs on Windows XP, and obtained phone calls between government officials.

You’ll hear a little untranslated Belarussian in this episode. I only want to highlight one bit that I think is important. When Shemetovets is talking about acquiring phone calls, we’ll play the raw audio of Belarussian government officials talking. What you’re hearing is someone bragging about beating up a protestor.

“I open the…car door, and pull this [woman] by her hair. I kicked her, and told the riot police to..and that bitch started screaming.”

The translated audio has quite a few more explivites in it.

This is an on-camera interview that first aired on VICE News as an episode of SuperUsers. It was produced by Louise McLoughlin and Cal Bateman.

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There are thousands of people still trapped in Ukraine and trying to flee. Millions are internally displaced and many are crossing the Polish border and finding refuge. But, for foreign students stuck in Ukraine, it can be much much more difficult to leave. A war zone is a terrible place to be no matter who you are, but these foreign students are facing unprecedented challenges. Thankfully, there are people trying to help.

That’s the subject of the Motherboard story “Inside the OSINT Operation to Get Foreign Students Out of Ukraine.” It was written by Sebastian Skov Andersen and Gabriel Geiger. One of the OSINT organizers is Chris Kubecka. On Cyber this week, all three are here to discuss the operation and the ongoing struggles of foreign nationals trying to flee a war zone.

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Stories of the death of religion in America are overblown. If you’re in the right part of the country, there are vibrant Christian communities developing apps, working in Christian-startups, and spreading their faith on Instagram and YouTube. There is a whole community and culture just outside of the mainstream using tech in all sorts of wild and interesting ways.

This week on Cyber, we explore the weird world of evangelical tech with Corrina Laughlin. She is a professor of media studies at Loyola Marymount University and author of the book Redeem All: How Digital Life is Changing Evangelical Culture.

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It started with SIM swapping and escalated into hacks of Okta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and EA. They’re LAPSUS$, a hacking collective that’s been the boogeyman of big corporations for the past few years. People have wondered about their motivations and identities.

Now, seven of them have been arrested. They’re mostly teenagers who used unsophisticated methods to get the better of some of the world’s most powerful companies.

On today’s episode of Cyber, Motherboard staff writer Joseph Cox walks us through what happened. It’s the subject of his story “LAPSUS$: How a Sloppy Extortion Gang Became One of the Most Prolific Hacking Groups.”

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We all type it. Some of us say it. Three little letters. L O L. Whether you’re laughing out loud or softening the blow of bad news, it’s so ubiquitous in the English speaking world that it’s almost become punctuation. But where did it come from and does it have a strict definition?

If you know anything about linguistics, you may already know the answers to those questions. Motherboard senior staff writer Shayla Love knows. She’s here today to talk about the origins of the phrase that’s part of our online world. It’s the subject of her new piece: “Why We Use ‘lol’ So Much.”

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The internet encourages the best and absolute worst of human behavior. Online led hate campaigns and conspiracy theories are often more than just frivolous distractions. They can ruin lives. In the U.S., I think the Gamergate movement from 2015 and 2016 opened a lot of people’s eyes to what was brewing under the surface of some of the darker places online. If Gamergate didn’t, then Qanon certainly did. But, across the Pacific Ocean, the people of Korea had a pretty good idea of how the internet can destroy lives long before it became a topic of think pieces in America.

That is the subject of the excellent Podcast, Authentic, a new show from VICE that focuses on the life of the Korean rapper Tablo and how the internet turned it upside down. With us today is its host and producer, Dexter Thomas. 

Authentic is available on iTunes, Spotify, iHeart Radio and pretty much every other podcast platform.

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Jason Koebler and Jordan Pearson talk about CRYPTOLAND, Motherboard's brand new documentary series about all things cryptocurrency. Watch CRYPTOLAND now at www.youtube.com/motherboard (please!!!)

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Amazon. The company none of us can seem to get away from. Whether you’re a Prime member or just surfing the web on sites hosted by AWS, the company is inescapable. But it’s worse when you work for them. Especially if you’re an independent contractor running delivery vans. It’s a job where crushing debt, sudden shifts in policy, and impossible demands are the norm. 

These Amazon Delivery Service Partners, or DSPs, are key to Amazon's dominant position, and the way many people are able to get what they order from the company so quickly, the next day or even within hours. But as Amazon gets unimaginably rich, some of these small companies are going bankrupt and leaving owners in crushing debt.

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This week on CYBER, Motherboard Senior Staff writer Lauren Kaori Gurley walks us through her piece ‘‘I Had Nothing to My Name’: Amazon Delivery Companies Are Being Crushed by Debt.

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Joseph Cox and Jason Koebler discuss various website defacements, leaks, and hacks associated with Russia's war in Ukraine.

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There are a lot of companies out there willing to sell shady customers the tools they need to spy on just about anyone. All over the world software vendors like Hacking Team and NSO Group will help you break into a cellphone or read an email you’re not supposed to. But that might soon be changing.

On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard senior staff writer Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai joins host Matthew Gault to talk about spyware vendors. It’s the subject of Lorenzo’s new piece, “The US Crackdown on Spyware Vendors Is Only Beginning.”

After a brief break, Gault and Franceschi-Bicchierai discuss the war in Ukraine. It’s a wide ranging conversation about the digital battleground. As of this recording, Russian Government Websites are Down and the world is discussing whether it's feasible and effective to prevent Russia from updating its software. Gault also talks about how a college professor used Google Maps traffic data to figure out the war had started before news had even broken.

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The internet has created an explosion in audio and video captured from the frontlines of war zones. As Russia escalates the conflict in Ukraine, it’s also pushing propaganda harder than ever. But there’s so much information available online, and so many people willing to call bullshit on propaganda, that it’s hard to make a believable video that justifies a war these days.

That hasn’t stopped Russia from trying.

On today’s episode of Cyber, Motherboard journalist Matthew Gault sits down with Motherboard editor-in-chief Jason Koebler to discuss the community of people online who are debunking Russian disinformation in real time. It’s a wide ranging conversation that goes from incredible memes to ethical considerations and a brief remembering of the Boston Marathon Bombing.

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Cops love technology. From robot dogs to drones to Ring cameras to tasers to facial recognition software, America’s police are often early adopters of the world’s newest dystopian tech. How does it happen? Often the tech companies are actively pitching police departments on stuff they say will make the cops’ life easier. Every month, conferences across the country are stuffed with tech companies and officers breaking bread and cutting deals.

What goes on at these conferences, exactly? This week on Cyber, Matthew sits down with Jack Poulson of Tech Inquiry to talk about a tech conference for cops he recently attended. It’s the subject of a new article on Motherboard—Please Delete Your Recordings: Inside a Police Conference.

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Roblox is one of the most popular and profitable video games ever created. Unless you’ve got kids, there’s a decent chance you’ve probably never heard of it. What makes it so engaging is that it’s a place where players develop and sell their own games and items. There is an internal economy and culture built around it. Roblox is, dare I say,  a metaverse all its own.

Lurking at the edges of that metaverse is a group of people called Beamers. With so many items floating around the Roblox economy worth so much cash and so many of them owned by children. That’s a target an unscrupulous hacker can hardly pass up.

This week on Cyber, Motherboard staff writer Joseph Cox walks us through the underground world of Roblox. It’s the subject of his newest piece, “How Roblox ‘Beamers’ Get Rich Stealing from Children.”

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In 2016, someone hacked the crypto exchange Bitfinex and made off with 120,000 BTC. At the time, the bitcoins were worth $65 million. Now they’re worth around $5 billion.

On February 7, authorities in the U.S. arrested Ilya Lichtenstein and his wife, Heather Morgan. The charge? Allegedly the couple laundered around $1 billion in stolen Bitcoin. As news of the charges spread, journalists began to dig into the couple and discovered that Morgan was extremely online. A wannabe rapper, Morgan has posted dozens of YouTube videos, TikToks, and contributed to Forbes. 

Here to talk about the hack, the charges, and Morgan’s outsized personality we’ve got Motherboard senior staff writer Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai and Motherboard Senior Editor Jordan Perason.

Morgan’s output is embarrassing, but it’s also a distraction from the very real crimes her and her husband have been charged with. Pearson and Franceschi-Bicchierai unpack the central mysteries that still linger on the case. The feds have seized the Bitcoin but haven’t charged the couple in the hack and there’s still so many questions about what happened in 2016.

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Motherboard Senior Staff writer Anna Merlan joins to talk about where disinformation comes from and whether we can stop it.

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The late 80s and early 90s were a golden age of free stuff on the internet. If you could afford the equipment and the access, you could find just about any piece of software you wanted without paying for it. And also a lot of pictures of naked people.

The Bulletin Board System, or BBS, was the lifeblood of this freewheeling time. It didn’t last long.

This week on Cyber we’re bringing you the story of Rusty ‘n’ Edie’s BBS: the Friendliest BBS in the World. Here to tell the tale is Motherboard Senior Staff Writer Samantha Cole. It’s the subject of her newest piece, The Death of Rusty n Edie’s, One of the Horniest Places on the 90s Internet.

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It’s been a wild few weeks for crypto and NFTs. The whole market took some hits, but the crypto markets especially have seemed to spiral. At the same time, there’s been so many hacks, stolen Apes, and ransomed tokens that it’s hard to keep track of them all.

This week on Cyber, we go through it all. Who lost what and how? Also, what is it about the blockchain that makes it so vulnerable to hacks and schemes?

Motherboard senior staff writer Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai and Motherboard Senior Editor Jordan Perason sit down with Matthew Gault to talk about the unique vulnerabilities of the crypto market and what happens when centralized systems try to interact with a decentralized platform.

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live on Wednesdays at 4pm EST. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

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What do you picture when you read the word “hacker?” I always see Cereal, Matthew Lillard’s character, from the movie Hackers. A dude with weird hair, intense need to make information free, and copies of 2600 magazine scattered around his dank apartment. 

That image is, and always was, a fantasy. What hackers are, and what they’ve become, is complicated. The word was once synonymous with “criminal,” but through years of activism and hard work, that’s changed. Now, “hacker” means so much more.

The story of how hackers became security professionals and respected, if not always trusted, members of society is the subject of the study Wearing Many Hats: The Rise of the Professional Security Hacker.

This week on Cyber, Harvard Anthropology professor Gabreilla Coleman and Data & Society researcher Matt Goerzen sit down to talk about the birth of the hacker scene and how criminals slowly turned themselves into vaunted security professionals.

It’s a fascinating story that involves Lubbock, Texas, a debate about arsonists and firefighters, and a litany of strange hacker handles.

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live on Wednesdays at 4pm EST. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

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Signal, the app, is synonymous with security. The end-to-end encrypted messaging platform is a go-to for discerning people who want to keep their communications private. Just remember to turn on the vanishing messages feature. But it’s CEO is stepping down. Moxie Marlinspike is out  and Whatsapp’s Brian Acton is in.

Motherboard staff writer Joseph Cox is on the show this week to talk to us about the changes at Signal, the history of end-to-end encryption, and what Marlinspike thinks of web3. It’s also the subject of his article, WhatsApp Co-Founder Is the New Acting CEO of Signal.

Cox sticks around for Cypher where we discuss the incredible news that marijuanna may be able to help prevent COVID-19, why PS5 restock accounts are helping people find COVID-19 tests, and how someone scraped massive amounts of personal data from a database used by private investigators.

We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. We record the show on Wednesdays at 4pm EST. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.

Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

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Popcorn time, a place where millions of people gathered everyday to watch low-res streams of their favorite films, is dead.

Or is it? According to Motherboard Editor-in-Chief Jason Koebler, rumors of the demise of the Netflix of Piracy have been greatly exaggerated. According to Jason, Popcorn time is likely unkillable.

It’s the first Cyber back after the holiday break and there’s a lot to talk about. After Jason and Matthew run through a brief history of pirating things online, they turn their attention to Call of Duty. Activision has revealed the identity of people it says are selling cheats to Warzone players. Now, it’s suing them.

We also talk about recently released pictures of the one of a kind Wu Tang Clan album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin obtained through a Freedom of Information Act Request. Judging by the pictures, the album wasn’t treated well while in government custody. And finally, we round out the week by talking about the CharaCorder—a keyboard so advanced that some people think it’s cheating.

We’re recording CYBER love on Twitch. Follow us on Twitch to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience. Yours just might end up on the show.

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Deadly storms swept through parts of the U.S. last Friday, killing at least 90 people. Six of those worked in an Amazon warehouse in Illinois. As the deadly tornado hit the warehouse, the walls fell inward, the roof collapsed. Moments before his death, worker Larry Virden texted his girlfriend to say “Amazon won’t let us leave.”

If you’ve ever worked retail or shipping during the holidays, you know that what is a restful period of joy and relaxation for much of the world is a stressful nightmare for you. Winter brings inclement weather, icy roads, and snow. Sometimes the choice is either putting yourself in danger or losing your job.

This week on Cyber, Motherboard Senior Staff writer and expert on all things labor, Lauren Kaori Gurley explains Amazon’s policies around inclement weather, worker safety, and why OSHA has opened an investigation into what happened the night of the deadly Tornado in Illinois.

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In which we go deep on ConstitutionDAO, and DAOs in general.

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Cyber’s intro music has clips from various movies. The first is from WarGames, a 1983 film where a hacker squares off against an artificial intelligence that’s in control of the nukes. Almost forty years later and AI is beating people at Starcraft 2, which is not quite the organization of a nuclear war but can still feel scary. 

But how smart are these systems really? Is AI, or “machine learning” as practitioners prefer to call it, the next big thing or just another in a series of promises about the future that hasn’t quite materialized? What are the actual dangers of these systems?

Here to help us answer this question is Os Keyes. Keyes is PhD student at the University of Washington’s Department of Human Centred Design & Engineering and an occasional Motherboard contributor. Their area of expertise is, broadly, how technology constructs the world we live in.

It’s a wide-ranging conversation that covers everything from Henry Kissinger to Human Centipede and the hard limits of artificial intelligence.

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Encrypted messaging apps. We all love them. You don’t have to be doing anything shady to want to make sure your messages are end-to-end encrypted. And for most people there’s dozens of options. Signal, Wicker, even WhatsApp boasts end-to-end encryption.

But what if you need something a little more secure? That’s where encrypted phone companies like Sky Global and Phantom come in. These companies cater to a more discerning clientele with a need for a more secure messaging environment. Which is part of how they get into such trouble with the feds.

With us today is Motherboard journalist Joseph Cox. He’s gonna tell us about his newest feature: Crime Boss or Tech CEO? An Encrypted Phone Company Sues the Government to Save Itself.

We’re recording CYBER love on Twitch. Follow us on Twitch to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience. Yours just might end up on the show.

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Today we are sharing an episode from one of our newest series -- A Show About Animals. This season, we tell the strange and wonderful story of the wildly famous Koko the “talking” Gorilla. 

In the early 1970s, a grad student named Penny Patterson set out to investigate a big question: is language unique to humans? So she begins an ambitious experiment -- with the help of a young gorilla named Koko. Pretty soon, Penny says Koko is learning sign language. But, of course, that’s not the whole story. 

You can listen to our weekly series, A Show About Animals, in all the places you get your podcasts. 

A Show About Animals is hosted and reported by Arielle Duhaime-Ross and produced by Julia Nutter and Pete Lang-Stanton. Our associate producer is Leily Rezvani. Sound design and original score by Pran Bandi, with additional support from Steve Bone. 

Annie Aviles is our executive editor. Our executive producer and VP of Vice Audio is Kate Osborn. 

Special thanks to Maximo Anderson for fact-checking.

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Apple recently announced a plan to sell customers manuals and parts that will let them fix their own iPhone 12s and 13s. It’s a huge win for the right to repair, but what are the specifics of the plan and what does it mean for the future of the repair movement in America?

This week on Cyber, Matthew Gault and Motherboard editor-in-chief Jason Koebler sat down with heavyweights of the right-to-repair movement to answer that question. This conversation between iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens, Repair.org’s Gay Gordon-Byrne, and U.S. PIRG’s Nathan Proctor covers everything from John Deere tractors to lies Apple tells when it’s lobbying against the right-to-repair.

A non-comprehensive list of the Motherboard reporting mentioned in this episode:

Half the Country Is Now Considering Right to Repair Laws

FTC Formally Adopts Right to Repair Platform

Apple Is Lobbying Against Your Right to Repair iPhones, New York State Records Confirm

Apple Is Telling Lawmakers People Will Hurt Themselves if They Try to Fix iPhones

Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors With Ukrainian Firmware

John Deere–Backed Lobbying Groups Host Anti-Right to Repair Conference

Department of Commerce Says We Need Fewer Repair Restrictions

Apple Said It Will Stop Breaking Face ID on Independently-Repaired iPhone 13s

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The Metaverse. The term was coined by author Neal Stephenson in his book Snow Crash. It was a digital playground where people were only limited by their imagination.

Facebook has changed its name to Meta and says it’s trying to make the metaverse a reality. Now, other companies are rushing to get a piece of Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of the future. Here to help me puzzle out the nightmarish world Silicon Valley billionaires want for us is Motherboard Senior Editor Janus Rose and panopticon expert and professor of English at Macomb Community College Chris Gilliard.

This wide-ranging conversation starts with Rose’s recent piece, “Zuckerberg’s Meta Endgame Is Monetizing All Human Behavior”, but it gets into the deeper and systemic issues around machine learning, artificial intelligence, and the kind of future we want.

We’re recording CYBER love on Twitch. Follow us on Twitch to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience. Yours just might end up on the show.

Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

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We’ve all gotten phone calls from someone trying to talk to us about our car’s extended warranty, even if we don’t own a car. But has a robot ever called you to try to get the code your bank sends you when you log on? If it hasn’t happened, it might very soon.

It’s the subject of Motherboard staff writer Joseph Cox’s new piece: The Booming Underground Market for Bots That Steal Your 2FA Codes.

We’re recording CYBER love on Twitch. Follow us on Twitch to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience. Yours just might end up on the show.

Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

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BONUS SERIES: Dune is out! And it's the biggest movie in America. In this special series, Motherboard and friends dissect all things Dune. In this episode, we look at how Frank Herbert approaches war, geopolitics,and desert power and how Denis Villeneuve handles it in the blockbuster movie.

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BONUS SERIES: Dune is out! And it's the biggest movie in America. In this special series, Motherboard and friends dissect all things Dune. In this episode, we look at how Frank Herbert approaches mysticism, spirituality, spice, and psychedelics and how Denis Villeneuve handles it in the blockbuster movie. Note to CYBER listeners: We're doing this series in addition to our normal CYBER episodes, which will still be released this week.

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BONUS SERIES: Dune is out! And it's the biggest movie in America. In this special series, Motherboard and friends dissect all things Dune. In this episode, we look at how Frank Herbert approaches eugenics and race in the book series, and how Denis Villeneuve handles it in the blockbuster movie. This episode features: Hood Feminism author Mikki Kendall, Edward Ongweso Jr., Gita Jackson, Jason Koebler, Brian Merchant, and Tim Marchman. Note to CYBER listeners: We're doing this series in addition to our normal CYBER episodes, which will still be released this week.

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BONUS SERIES: Dune is out! And it's the biggest movie in America. In this special series, Motherboard and friends dissect all things Dune. In this episode, we look at how Frank Herbert approaches oil, environmental destruction, and what it can tell us about how we treat our planet. Note to CYBER listeners: We're doing this series in addition to our normal CYBER episodes, which will still be released this week.

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Hello out there in cyber land. It’s striketober in America.

From the John Deere factory floor to the cereal crunching halls of Kellogg's, workers are telling management they’ve had enough. It’s labor unrest the U.S. hasn’t seen in my lifetime.

Thankfully today I’m joined by Motherboard Senior Staff writer and expert on all things labor, Lauren Kaori Gurley. 

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On October 6, a massive leak of Twitch data revealed how much cash its biggest streamers made. The leak isn’t the first time Twitch’s security has been called into question and as the fallout from the leak spiraled, Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai went looking for an older story, the story of Urgent Pizza. This week on Cyber, Lorenzo tells us the story of the biggest hack in Twitch history. In 2014 unskilled hackers walked right into Twitch’s code and made off with everything. It was right after Amazon had paid nearly $1 billion for the company. Later, Lorenzo breaks down everything Activision is doing to prevent cheating in Call of Duty.

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When America withdrew from Afghanistan it left people behind. Interpreters, aid workers, allies, and even some U.S. citizens remained in the country as the Taliban took over. Since the official U.S. military exit, dozens of groups have sprung up to try to help people safely flee the country. 

Not all of them are competent, but most of them are asking for money.

Vice Motherboard features editor Tim Marchman and senior Staff Writer Anna Merlan looked into this for a piece titled The Anti-Trafficking Movement Is Pivoting to Afghanistan. Marchman is here today to talk with us about the weird world of online led anti-trafficking groups and how they’ve latched onto Afghanistan as their newest cause.

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On Cyber this week we bring you an episode from the podcast Darknet Diaries by Jack Rhysider. In 2016, America went to war against ISIS at the head of an international coalition. The U.S. sent ships, soldiers, and material to the Middle East to fight off the Islamic State. It also sent cyber warriors to combat ISIS online. This is the story of Operation Glowing Symphony, an inside look at how the U.S. hacked the Islamic State and how the future of war is completely online.

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An anonymous poster on 4Chan published 135 gigabytes of what appears to be internal data stolen from Twitch, including exactly how much money the platform’s biggest streamers make on Twitch. 

On Wednesday, the poster published a link to a torrent of 135 GB, calling it "an extremely poggers leak" which allegedly includes source code for all Twitch clients for different operating systems, an unreleased Steam competitor, and internal tools that Twitch's security team uses. 

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Syniverse, a company that is a critical part of the global telecommunications infrastructure used by AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and several others around the world such as Vodafone and China Mobile, quietly disclosed that hackers were inside its systems for years, impacting more than 200 of its clients and potentially millions of cellphone users worldwide. Plus! Facebook is extremely down. What's going on?

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If you’re on Facebook then there’s a company you’ve probably never heard of that makes it bearable. Accenture. The little-known consulting firm is one of the biggest companies in the booming market of content moderation. But you’ll probably never hear its name come out of the lips of Mark Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandberg.

When it comes to the world’s largest social media site, you either love it or you hate it. But chances are you don’t want to see a video of a dog skinned alive while you’re checking in on people from high school. That’s where Accenture comes in. AI gets rid of a lot, but sometimes a human has to make a call. The psychic cost of that work is devastating but it’s worth a lot of money to Facebook.

Here to help us understand the bizarrely secret world of Facebook’s content moderation is Mike Issac of The New York Times. Isaac is a best-selling author who just co-wrote a story about all this titled The Silent Partner Cleaning Up Facebook for $500 Million a Year.

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Amazon's new robot called Astro is designed to track the behavior of everyone in your home to help it perform its surveillance and helper duties, according to leaked internal development documents and video recordings of Astro software development meetings obtained by Motherboard. The system's person recognition system is heavily flawed, according to two sources who worked on the project.

The documents, which largely use Astro's internal codename "Vesta" for the device, give extensive insight into the robot's design, Amazon's philosophy, how the device tracks customer behavior as well as flow charts of how it determines who a "stranger" is and whether it should take any sort of "investigation activity" against them.

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This is Rob Graham, an independent security researcher who is also known as ErrataRob on Twitter. What if you could go back in time and make sure you made the deadline on a college assignment? That’s basically what Rob did by hacking his professor. Rob is very well known in the community for having created Masscan, a tool that lets anyone scan the entire internet in just a few minute and for his sometimes controversial hot takes on Twitter. Rob was recently at the ridiculed cybersecurity conference organized by the MyPillow CEO. He was one of the only actual experts there, and one of the few people who wore a mask. 

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A strange press release went out on September 13th. Retail giant Walmart, it seemed, would soon be accepting crypto currency. “The eCommerce giant intends to give its millions of shoppers across the world an opportunity to seamlessly make payments with cryptocurrencies,” the press release said. The press release was bullshit.

The world of cryptocurrency is rife with scams. Pump and dumps, fake coins, massive hacks. Members of a professional eSports influencer house have been accused of running a crypto-based charity scam, a hacker recently made off with $600 million in Bitcoin, the SEC is investigating a crypto backed fraud case that’s alleged to have screwed investors out of billions.

The list goes on and on. What is it about these digital currencies that makes them so vulnerable to getting ripped off and how do you keep yourself safe?

Here to help us navigate the murky waters of Crypto currency and its many scams is Motherboard Senior Editor Jordan Pearson.

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Two-factor authentication is simple and easy to use, right? Whenever you log in to your email, work account, or social media platform you get a text message or email asking you to confirm your identity.  It’s easy and safe and we’re all using it. Right? Well … the numbers don’t look good. Information Security professionals are always trying to get their clients to adopt multi-factor authentication, but the clients don’t seem to be listening. Twitter recently disclosed that the number of accounts using 2FA is only 2.3%, a depressingly tiny number. Especially given the amount of security breaches we’ve seen lately. A recent T-Mobile breach is said to affect nearly 50 million customers.

Here to walk us through the merits 2FA is Rachel Tobac. Tobac is a hacker and the CEO of SocialProof Security, a company that aims to get your organization politely paranoid.

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If you’ve played video games online, it’s happened to you. You’re holding it down in the warzone, helping your squad score a dub when suddenly your head explodes and there’s no way anyone on the enemy team could have known where you were let alone make the shot that killed you.

Do you just suck or could it be … a hacker?

Claiming a hacker killed you instead of taking the L with dignity is a time honored tradition in gaming. But in a lot of online shooters and Call of Duty in particular, hacking has become ubiquitous. The issue is so prevalent that Activision literally can’t remove them from the game fast enough and the people selling the hacks are running out of stock.

Here to walk us through the dark side of Call of Duty is Motherboard staff writer Joseph Cox.

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Double agents are a Cold War trope. An American spy has *gasp* secretly been working for the Soviets the whole time. These days, you’re more likely to run into a double agent in the world of corporate information technology. Sometimes hackers are selling company secrets while helping the very corporations they exploit.

Andrey Shumeyko was one such double agent. The hacker cruised the digital hangouts of people who bought and sold the secrets of Apple. Facing financial pressure and—to hear them tell it, a sense of guilt—they reached out to Apple.

Things didn’t go quite as Shumeyko expected.

This is the story of Apple’s Double Agent, brought to you by Motherboard’s Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai.

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This is Ophir Harpaz, a security researcher at Guardicore. Her first hack was to reverse engineer the classic Windows game Minesweeper. Her goal was to force the program to put flags on all squares with mines—as soon as the board shows up. That essentially makes it incredibly easy to beat the game. That exercise changed her life.

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This week, we're doing things a little differently.

VICE's 2030 Fellow Samir Ferdowsi spoke with Setareh Soroush, The Women's Rights Director for Middle East Matter's, a community of online activists aiming to bring untold stories and news from the region across borders and in front of Western audiences.

We sat down with Soroush to find out how the organization works, and what being a Middle Eastern activist in a volatile and sometimes, downright dangerous digital landscape looks like.

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It’s an old story with a new twist. A top administrator of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops resigned after someone leaked information about their private life. Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill left his post after a Catholic oriented Substack accused him of being a frequent user of Grindr.

Simple on the surface, but our obsession with the sex live’s of the clergy is masking something darker. How, exactly, did the Substack know that Monsignor. Burrill was using Grindr? How many of our apps are spying on us and collecting this kind of data? And just how easy is it for a viscous third party to get hold of that data for nefarious ends.

Here to answer those questions and more is Motherboard staff writer Joseph Cox.

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If you’ve tried catching an Uber recently you may have noticed that prices and wait times are worse than they’ve ever been. Rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft didn’t fare well during the pandemic and now that restrictions are easing, drivers just aren’t coming back.

Motherboard Staff Writer Edward Ongweso Jr spent some time talking to Uber drivers to find out what’s going on. He’s here to tell us what he found out, but here’s a preview: Uber and Lyft Can’t Find Drivers Because Gig Work Sucks.

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Fascists love to perfect a look. Hugo Boss’ Nazi Uniforms, the striking headquarters of the Italian Fascist party, and the sleek presentation of Islamic State’s Dabiq all have one thing in common—they’re visually striking.

So too with today’s extremists. Neo-Nazis from Atomwaffen Division to the Order of the 9 Angles have a certain aesthetic flair. And that’s largely down to a few influential artists. VICE extremism reporter and Cyber host Ben Makuch recently went in search of ‘Dark Foreigner:’ The Artist Who Fueled a Neo-Nazi Terror Movement. 

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A heat dome in the Western part of the continent reached 117 degrees. A town in British Columbia burned to the ground, and temperatures in Europe are shattering records. Climate change is here and it’s killing us. But it’s not just the heat. It’s the humidity. That’s why scientists are studying “wet bulb conditions”— or temperatures at which humans spontaneously die.

What, exactly, are “wet bulb” conditions and when do we need to start worrying about them? Can we do anything to stop them? Are people already dying? Here to answer these questions and more is Motherboard intern Audrey Carleton, who has been covering this for the site.

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More than 1,800 years ago, Marcus Aurelius wrote, “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly.” If you’ve ever thought the same before logging into social media, you aren’t alone. In addition to being Emperor of Rome, Aurelius is one of the founders of Stoicism—an ancient philosophy that’s recently become widely popular among the Silicon Valley elite.

But what do ancient Roman philosophers have to do with billionaire tech bros like Jack Dorsey? A lot, it turns out. Vice Senior Staff Writer Shayla Love wrote the ultimate stoicism explainer and she’s here with us today to talk about what it means that the world’s rich and powerful are turning to ancient texts for life advice.

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Andrew Tierney, better known online as Cybergibbons, earned his reputation hacking things like thermostats, home alarms, and other hardware like cryptocurrency wallets. 

So it makes a lot of sense that his first ever hack back in the 90s was to take control of his high school’s heating system from his bedroom. Here's the story of Andrew's first hack.

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Imagine you’re at work, it’s a long day and you lean back in your chair only to hear a chime and a disembodied voice.The voice fills the room and it tells you to stop leaning and get back to work.

There’s a sense that someone is always watching and ready to reprimand you for the slightest infraction.

That’s the promise of Live Eye—a CCTV camera system which, for a monthly fee, will monitor a store's security cameras 24/7 and step in if there’s trouble. It sells itself as a safety feature, but as a new report from Motherboard's Todd Feathers’ shows …. It’s anything but safe.

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Just as Amazon founder and richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, announced that he was going into space via his private rocket company and news broke that he pays shockingly little on his income taxes, New York state is set to pass a groundbreaking antitrust law that will challenge the labor practices of the tech giant. 

At the same time, Motherboard reporter Lauren Gurley broke the news of yet-more ill treatment of Amazon workers that will blow your mind. With more on that she’s on this week’s show to tell us more.

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It’s basically the FBI’s greatest fantasy come to life: Owning an operating an encrypted communications company exclusively used by some of the world’s most hardened and organized criminals.

“Anom” the subscription based network operated by the feds, was used as the ultimate spy tool that gave an almost godlike view of organized crime to FBI agents who watched users discuss murder, drug deals, and millions of dollars worth of criminal activity. And it all came to a screeching halt this week when a coordinated law enforcement effort around the world took down its customer base.

Motherboard reporter Joseph Cox is on the show to talk in more details about the latest takedown by the FBI.

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The Central Intelligence Agency. Since its inception during the Cold War days it’s taken on the mystique as the silent hand of the US government. It’s been entwined in controversies ranging from the Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War, to Watergate and most recently, it’s role in the universally condemned torture of detainees during the decadeslong War On Terror. But then in 2014, something happened that heralded a brand new era in the once ultra-secretive (and not very public) spy agency: It got a Twitter account. Since, the CIA has been undergoing some kind of public rebranding. But why does an intelligence agency that’s whole existence is based on how good at being secret it is, need a public presence? Motherboard reporter Edward Ongweso is on the show to talk spies and tweets with me.

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Before he even knew he wanted to be a hacker, Haroon Meer figured out “on a whim” that he could mess with all the high school computers by just changing one single character in a configuration file. With this newly acquired power, Haroon pranked his best friend using a quote from a classic Jean-Claude Van Damme 1980s movie. He also made his clueless computer science teacher really mad.

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The many Mexican cartels of the last few decades have developed into what the US government sees as a not only criminal but a geopolitical enemy, joining the ranks of the Taliban, ISIS, al-Qaeda, and Russian hackers. This means the full force of American surveillance has been aimed at groups like Los Zetas, or the Sinaloa Cartel once-led by the infamous El Chapo. But when it comes to hackers and cybersecurity, there isn’t a lot of talk on how the cartels view their own online safety, so today we’re talking to VICE News Reporter Keegan Hamilton who has intimately covered the cartels from inside Mexico.Trust me this man has a lot of guts and he’s on the show to chat with me this week.

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So another band of hackers struck again: a criminal gang known as ‘DarkSide’ unleashed a ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline, which shut down an integral line that supplies the East Coast with oil and gas. While the cyberattack itself didn’t physically knock out the pipeline with a string of code, the resulting attack majorly disrupted a critical piece of US infrastructure: Fuel. While the Biden administration is scrambling to deal with the fallout, questions surrounding DarkSide and its motivations persist. To chat more on that, Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Francheschi-Bicchierai is on the show.  

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An ‘avalanche of cardboard’ is completely overwhelming card grading companies as collectors try to cash in on Pokemon’s resurgent popularity.

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For years, Apple has claimed its devices are the most secure in the world, poo-pooing PC and Android devices for being as clean as a public swimming pool. But just this week, Motherboard’s very own Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai reported on what is being described as one of the biggest security flaws of Apple products exploited by hackers ever, and it could have affected you. He’s on the latest episode to talk about this and the year so far in Mac exploits.

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It’s easily one of the world’s most popular messaging apps, owned and operated by Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook empire.But more recently WhatsApp has come under some serious scrutiny for some very specific privacy concerns by experts and journalists alike. Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchieraiis on the show this week to tell us more.

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Since Capitol Hill everybody has become pretty intimately familiar with how radical and violent the far-right truly is. Online it exists in cesspools like the encrypted app Telegram, or Gab, a Twitter knockoff popular among extremists and Maga types alike.And one thing many forms of far-right have in common is their hatred porn and the name-brand of porn, PornHub. Our Motherboard reporter Sam Cole dug into the world of anti-porn Nazis so you don’t have to, and is on the show to talk about it.

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What if we told you that your phone could be hacked 16$ and all of the texts that were meant for you, were rerouted to someone else with nefarious designs on your most personal exchanges? It’s a real thing and it happened to Motherboard reporter Joseph Cox who is on the show to explain how a simple hack, costing nothing at all, could happen to you.In fact, we were recording another interview and Joseph was being hacked in real-time. We start there on this week’s episode.

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Katie Moussouris is now a recognizable name in the cybersecurity industry. She is one of the pioneers in the world of bug bounties after starting Microsoft’s program. But before she became a famous hacker, Moussouris started like many others: hacking video games. Here’s the story of her first hack.

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This is a re-run of an episode originally released on July 18th, 2019

A Silicon Valley company with a history of CIA funding, a suite of highly sought after intelligence software tools, and a gallivanting billionaire founder with connections to the Trump Administration is set to become one of the biggest IPOs in recent memory.

Yet many outside of the infosec world don’t even know its name or that it even exists—a sharp difference Palantir doesn’t share with other similar-sized startups based out of the Silicon Valley.

But Palantir’s surveillance software, which essentially siphons up monumental amounts of data on the public using state, police, and federal databases can map interpersonal relationships between people and provide that info to the fingertips of police and spies in a matter of seconds.

Among the list of past and current Palantir clients are the NSA, CIA, Department of Homeland Security and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement—which directly uses its technology to fuel its controversial raids on undocument workers. 

Motherboard reporter Caroline Haskins obtained a copy of one of the company’s top-secret police manuals describing how to use its software. The revelation gave privacy-concerned onlookers a rare insight into just how invasive Palantir technology can be.

On this week’s CYBER, Caroline sits down with host Ben Makuch to map out what Palantir is and how this company influences the very technological landscape of the modern world. 

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He’s been a Hollywood superstar for what feels like, well, forever. Top Gun, Mission Impossible, hey even that weird Hitler assassination movie where he doesn’t speak German or even fake an accent. Tom Cruise is everywhere was in everything and most recently made headlines for being deep faked. And this was just any Deep Fake, this was the creepiest most realistic Deep Fake, probably ever. For more on what that means, Motherboard reporter Sam Cole is on the show to chat.

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Wanna hear a story that involves automatic license plate reader technology, AI-powered cameras that detect the movements of cars across the United States, cops, and well, Burger King? Well today on the show we have Motherboard reporter of all-things-surveillance, Joseph Cox, on to tell us about Flock: a little-known company that’s hawking smart-surveillance cameras that are quietly creeping individual neighborhoods across the country for police.

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It is arguably America’s favourite fast-food restaurant. Home of the Big-Mac, McNuggets and that creepy clown that used to haunt my dreams. McDonald’s is classic Americana that has spread all over the world. But lately, a Motherboard exclusive shows, Ronald’s house of burgers allegedly used private spies to surveil it’s workers. For the latest on this, we have our very own Lorenzo Francheschi-Bicchierai on to discuss.

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Let’s be real: most people watch it and it’s about as fundamental to Internet culture as Google itself: Porn. And nowadays, that means Pornhub, the massive shadow YouTube for porn that accumulates millions of clicks daily. Recently, Pornhub made headlines when a New York Times expose showed the site hosts thousands of illegal videos, which forced the site to take down all unverified content and vastly change its content rules.The story caused waves and has begged questions surrounding what the future of porn will look like online. Motherboard reporter Sam Cole has been covering this beat for years and is on the show to explain the latest on one of the most popular sites on the Internet.

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It’s one of my favorite cyber topics in the books: the cyber arms race and the increasing weaponization of the internet and how that plays into the world of geopolitics. Of course that means spies, hackers, dealers and journalists alike. That’s why today we have New York Times cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth to talk about her new book: This is How They Tell Me The World Ends.

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Years before he became the world’s most well known MacOS hacker, Patrick Wardle was a high school nerd curious about hacking. His first hack was figuring out that he could program his fancy calculator and hide a backdoor in it that could help him with his calculus tests. His teacher never caught him, and he actually learned how to solve calculus equations by programming his calculator. “So I’m sure that in retrospect my calculus teacher would be stoked...or that’s what I tell myself,” Wardle said.

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It’s safe to say that video games are now an essential part of our culture. Globally it’s already dwarfing other classic industries. Even the U.S. military, by far the most powerful war-machine in human history, uses video games to recruit the generation soldier. On the show today is VICE News Correspondent Dexter Thomas who is hosting the new VICEtv series. RESET: The Unauthorized Guide to Video Games.

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It’s a mixture of Internet trolling, Reddit threads, the fall of capitalism as we know it, and that movie Big Short. If like me you have but a cursory understanding of the stock market and you continually see mention of this GameStop fiasco making headlines the world over. That’s right: A failing video game store has been turned into a multibillion dollar company, by day-trading cartels who live on the Internet. Motherboard EIC Jason Koebler, who knows something about stocks, is on the show to explain more.

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Well folks, whether you were #resistance or MAGA, he’s arrived. The 46th President of the United States, Joe Biden. What’s he going to do about Russian hackers? Big Tech? Disinformation? Facebook? The NSA, the CIA? All that and more on this week’s episode with Motherboard EIC Jason Keobler.

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Parler. Gab. The President being suspended from almost every mainstream social media entity and finally prevented from engaging in his favorite addiction: Tweeting. Besides the horned Qanon shaman and the disgusting violence on Capitol Hill last week, it has been a hell of a week for social media. Motherboard EIC Jason Koebler and I break it all down for you on today’s episode.

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As President Trump exits office in a hail of conspiracy and baseless allegations about a fraudulent election, the time has come for us to discuss the much vaunted QAnon, led by a shadowy online figure known as “Q.” The verifiably absurd, online conspiracy theory that has ruined lives and families, has seduced millions and even helped propel members of congress into seats. And it just inspired a violent occupation of our nation’s capitol hill. Marc-André Argentino, a PhD candidate at Concordia University who studies QAnon and someone who has become a leading voice on the extremist political movement, is on the show to talk Q.

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Let’s be honest, I know history types keep saying that like the year 536 was way worse than 2020, but I do not care. 2020 was unadulterated trash by almost every metric available. In the cyber world it was also a year that helped advance insidious surveillance tools, the proliferation of disinformation, and more Russian hackers. Jason Koebler, Motherboard EIC, is on the show for the last time in 2020.

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This week we have a very special guest on the show: All-star sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow, a fellow Canadian, and someone who has written about the dystopian near future with stunning accuracy.

His latest novel, Attack Surface, tells the tale of a counterterrorism agent and the terrifying power of the surveillance state.

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Every pro hacker started somewhere. In this interview series, hackers and security researchers tell their origin stories. 

For the first episode, we spoke to former government hacker Emily Crose, who now works for a critical infrastructure security startup. Here's Emily's first hack, in her own words." 

"My first hack happened in high school when I was playing around with Back Orifice 2000 or BO2K, the infamous remote access trojan made by the hacking group Cult of The Dead Cow. My first victim was, well, myself. This was an accidental self infection, that's the technical term" Crose said.

"I infected my own computer with BO2K, and it took me a while to figure out what had happened, but when I did figure it out, I got a chance to learn the software. It's not a thing that people will talk about certainly, but even professional developers these days just run the wrong thing in the wrong place and, oops, oopsie, doopsie," she said.

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Who ya gonna call when you are one of the greatest, multibillion dollar cybersecurity firms in the world, known for investigating breaches into governments and major corporations, when you’re hacked?

Well in the case of Fireeye, known for being staffed by ex-intelligence and doing the forensics on massive hacks, they came out and responsibly disclosed that it had been breached.

It’s big news in the hacking world and with me today is Motherboard reporter Joseph Cox to breakdown what happened and why it matters.

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Founded in 1850 by Allan Pinkerton, a Scottish immigrant that went on to become the first detective in the history of Chicago, the Pinkerton Detective Agency became synonymous in American life with conspiracy theories and violent clandestine activities—and with good reason. Though Pinkerton himself was one of the Union’s first spymasters during the Civil War and foiled an assassination plot on President Lincoln in 1861, he did what every ex-intelligence community type does after wars nowadays: Uses his government skills and contacts to profit in the private sector. 

In its early years the agency, something of a precursor to the infamous Blackwater mercenary outfit founded by Erik Prince that is linked to war crimes in Iraq, was at one time bigger than the U.S. Army and connected to outlandishly villainous plots that were in fact true. For example, Pinkerton agents were actually the private armies for the rich industrial titans of the Gilded Age, helping union bust and infiltrate workers groups. Even going so far as to shoot striking workers like a private-death-squad-for-hire in Colorado. Pinkerton agents were also alleged to have firebombed the home of the outlaw Jesse James’ mother (while James wasn’t there), blowing her arm off and killing his half-brother. Both weren’t involved in any of the ex-Confederate’s crimes. 

Well, unlike most companies founded almost two-hundred years ago, the Pinkerton agency still exists and recently, not unlike how the capitalist behemoths of yesteryear used it, it was hired by Jeff Bezos’s Amazon to union bust in Europe. 

Motherboard reporter Lauren Kaori-Gurley is on CYBER this week to talk about her scoop.

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In the second and final episode in a series for CYBER on neo-Nazi terror group the Base, we dive into its origins: The online brainchild of its leader Rinaldo Nazzaro, an ex-Pentagon contractor with alleged links to the Kremlin (which he denies) who began his project for “race war” as a WordPress site that evolved into a secretive, encrypted chat group, then into paramilitary training in the fall of 2018. But shortly after, VICE News broke the first story on the group and authorities began circling.

Once that viral feature published, some members of the Base fled the group, while others regrouped online and in-real-life, more committed to creating a homegrown, American insurgency against the government than ever. Over the course of the winter and spring of 2019, the Base recovered, gaining momentum and new recruits from across the U.S. and abroad. Threatening propaganda images emerge of members in the middle of Central Park in New York City, other members in Georgia call for attacks on the electric grid and a Canadian soldier (and terror suspect) is illegally on the lam in the U.S. with the help of the Base. But after a series of failed terror plots is disrupted by the FBI (and the bold actions of an undercover who infiltrates the group) the Base is torn apart in a series of stunning nationwide raids in January 2020. 

The final installment, titled “Train. Fight. Organize.,” is a discussion between reporters Ben Makuch and Mack Lamoureux, who have investigated the group for over two years, and features never-before heard phone calls obtained by VICE News from a confidential source, between the Base and its cell leaders discussing new recruits and how to use the war in Ukraine as a potential terror pipeline. 

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For us, the story of the Base all began in the spring of 2018 when we spotted the Twitter profile picture of a shadowy neo-Nazi who went by the alias ‘Norman Spear.’ The photo was eye catching: He looked severe, with a strong brow and a bushy beard, and tweeted about guerilla warfare and the tactics of insurgency. 

At the time, Spear also had the attention of some serious operators in the domestic terror space: On Twitter he was followed by and following an assortment of well known, online, far-right militants. We saw members of Atomwaffen Division—a Nazi terror group that was already connected to murders and a chilling plot to bomb a nuclear power plant—and right-wing trolls alike, some of which were gaining the attentions of federal authorities that worried about another Oklahoma City bombing, all linked to Spear.

Then Spear started tweeting about what was one of the most ambitious plots coming out of the American far-right movement to date: funneling all the disparate worlds of extremists, activists, and trolls festering all over social media after the election of President Trump in 2016, into one trained and networked, IRL coalition fighting for a “race war”. What he started as a WordPress site and an entrance application, Spear grew into ‘the Base;’ a bonafide terror group, with over 50 members, operating both in the real world at paramilitary camps, and online using encrypted apps like Wire and Riot. 

Eventually, by January 2020, the Base would make chilling news: An assassination plot, plans to shoot up a political rally, and a national campaign to vandalize synagogues. In the end, the FBI deployed an undercover into the Base and undertook a nationwide crackdown on the group raiding apartments and homes in Delaware, Marylan, Georgia, Wisconsin and New Jersey, nabbing 9 members. But Spear, who was revealed to be a 47 year-old American and ex-Pentagon contractor (who worked with the special forces) named Rinaldo Nazzaro, never went to jail. Instead, he continues to allegedly live in Russia, where he is suspected of being a Kremlin asset.

In a two-part series for CYBER—using secret recordings, sources coming from inside the group, and never before heard materials—we’ll dive deep into the birth and demise of what became one of the most prominent and dangerous American far-right organizations in the modern era. 

This is the story of the Base.

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The last time Phineas Fisher agreed to an interview with Motherboard, they made us recreate the whole thing with a puppet. 

This time around, Phineas Fisher—one of the world’s most wanted hackers—wanted to make a statement on CYBER to deny he’s an agent of the Kremlin.

Phineas Fisher is the hacker’s hacker that nobody knows. In fact, nobody even knows if they are just one person, or several people. All we know is Phineas Fisher has hacked, embarrassed, and exposed some of the world’s most powerful spyware companies that have connections to the FBI, the DEA, and dozens of other law enforcement and spy agencies all around the world. 

And Phineas Fisher has completely gotten away with it. 

Throughout these exploits, Motherboard'sLorenzo Francheschi-Bicchierai has been one of the few reporters to make contact with the hacker several times. Recently, Phineas Fisher got in touch with him again, but this time to deny a recent allegation that he’s Russian intelligence operation made in Joseph Menn’s new book on hacktivism.

On this week’s CYBER re-run, Lorenzo sits down with host Ben Makuch to take you through the murky history of Phineas Fisher’s hacks, then the infamous hacktivist speaks.

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What is going on? Why is it going on? Is this actually real? Disinformation in the election was always going to be a thing, and well, it was. Today on Cyber, Ben Makuch and Jason Koebler discuss the state of play and why we're here, Iranian hackers, and mass conspiracies on twitter.

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Is Antifa even a thing? Ahead of an election positioned as “us” versus “them,” the specter of “Antifa” has become an easy boogeyman to either accept or reject out of hand. VICE News takes a serious look at what it is and what it is not. VICE News Correspondent Alzo Slade reports from across the country.

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You know, if you haven’t heard, in the last few years there’s been a lot of discussion around America’s problems with systemic white supremacism and well, white nationalists. Everybody remembers that day in Charlottesville and the problems with the far-right we’ve seen since. Especially during this 2020 election season. In her new book Culture Warlords, journalist Talia Lavin goes undercover to expose the underworld of online fascists, Nazis, and Trump trolls alike.

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Vince Ramos wanted Phantom Secure to be the Uber of privacy-focused, luxury-branded phones—flood the market with devices, and sort out the law later. Then the FBI investigated him.

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This week, we talk to Jek, a physical penetration tester whose job is to infiltrate offices, data centers, store stockrooms, and other supposedly "secure" locations and either steal information or install a tool so that other hackers can exfiltrate data. She relies on the most reliable vulnerability of all: human weakness. Jek tells host Ben Makuch how she does it, some of her most memorable operations, and why other hackers think that what she does is "witchcraft."

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In this age of social collapse and modern plague it’s easy to forget that the 2016 Presidential Election was a clusterfuck of gargantuan proportions. Never before (then) had an election campaign for the highest office in the country become not only a drama, but a media spectacle with a shocking finale.

Russian spies. Secret payoffs. Wikileaks. Guccifer 2.0. War in Ukraine. Election interference. All spelling (maybe?), the first chapter in the ending to the American Experiment?

HBO has released a great new two-part documentary deep diving this entire, historical ordeal. Co-directed by film great Alex Gibney and Javier Botero, Agents of Chaos parses exactly what happened to America during what’s become the most insane election ever (at least so far). 

Botero is on the show this week to talk about the doc, the chaos of 2016 and what legacy it has left America.

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Audio deepfakes are getting more convincing than ever. To test this out, we’ve replaced our host Ben Makuch with a robotic clone of himself. Sponsored by NeXt.

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A thriller about a Silicon Valley pioneer who joins forces with a Special Agent to stop the A.I. he created from destroying humanity. Starting October 6th, NEXT airs every Tuesday at 9/8c on FOX. On this episode of Cyber, in partnership with FOX, we sit down with the show’s creator Manny Coto to talk about the inspiration for this thriller A.I. Coto’s history as a horror and science fiction writer is on display in NEXT. He got the idea for his show about a rogue AI when a smart device in his home started to malfunction and call out in the middle of the night.

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It’s been a pretty bad PR year for the world’s most popular ride-share app… And unsurprisingly it has poured money into good news stories, to kick up warm fuzzy feelings about a company that has been found, time and again, to not care very much about its drivers.

Enter a CNBC paid partnership story about an UberEats driver who is about to make 100k a year. The American Dream, right? Not so, says Motherboard reporter Edward Ongweso who broke down the falsities of this rather suspect piece of news.

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Since the War on Terror kicked off, the military and spy industrial complex has boomed. That also includes a growth in the literal number of spies from agencies like the NSA and CIA, all serving tours, then often entering the private sector. Since then, we’ve seen how things like corporate espionage and the techniques multibillion dollar entities deploy in their interests, have seriously taken off from the trickle down of said veterans entering the workforce Now, we’re in a situation where everybody uses techniques like social media monitoring to glean intel into their own businesses. Recently, in the case of Amazon that means carrying out a fairly professional surveillance op on its own workers. Motherboard’s Lauren Gurley has the story.

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It almost reads like a dystopian plot from a sci-fi novel, playing out in the not-so-distant future. 

A major world government relies on a defective and cruel algorithm for debt collection, to extort money out of its most vulnerable citizens who were already on social assistance. Or to put it more succinctly: state-sponsored shakedowns via Artificial Intelligence, that ends up being so flawed it results in the country taking hundreds of millions of dollars from its own people.

Sounds unreal, right? Well, this actually happened in Australia, a major country with a huge economic footprint around the world. For more on the story we’ve got Motherboard editor and Jordan Pearson on CYBER.

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The tale started with an encrypted phone company, Morroccan gangsters, the Scottish mafia, and a blogger. It ended with an assassination outside of a sex club in Amsterdam.

Last week, Motherboard reporter Joseph Cox broke the news that MPC—a Scottish company that hawked special encrypted phones that could evade police surveillance—had been connected to the murder of crime blogger Martin Kok. Kok was a former criminal himself who had previously served a jail sentence for two murders.

Kok’s crime blogging had gotten him on the wrong side of the Gillespie brothers, two Scots who are still operating a highly sophisticated drug and gun running operation connected to South American cartels, as well as Morroccan gangster associates. They allegedly hatched a successful plan to kill him in December 2016.

On this week’s episode of CYBER, Cox goes into detail about how this criminal syndicate carried out Kok's murder, and what it means for crime in 2019 when the mafia isn’t buying encrypted phones, but making them for itself.

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Content Warning: Descriptions of Sexually Explicit Acts

Introducing VENT Documentaries from VICE UK: Young people from London, telling you the stories they care about. In this episode, Khalil grew up with homophobic parents, so he had to learn about being gay on his own. From making Sims characters have gay sex to signing up to online sexting forums, Khalil tells the sometimes hilarious, sometimes graphic and sometimes painful story of what it’s like to come into your queerness on the internet. 

Subscribe to VENT Documentaries wherever you listen to podcasts:

Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/7FpQDTtYnVsCvztk3wmflP

Apple: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/vent-documentaries/id1501178221 

Acast: play.acast.com/s/ventdocumentaries

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By the year 2000 people started believing, in the advent of widespread email culture, that the United States Postal Service was doomed. Conservatives and business types argued that it was a bloated institution.But it’s not. In fact, it’s a vital, robust network that is literally a failsafe in the doomsday plans of the federal government. These days, while people may not be sending many letters or postcards, the USPS is an essential service helping us vote, get our medicine and deliver us packages. President Trump isn’t a fan. But Motherboard reporter Aaron Gordon is, and he’s on the show this week to tell us more about the future of the Postal Service.

He's also just launched a newsletter, The Mail, which is all about the USPS. You can subscribe to The Mail by entering your email address at vice.com/themail.

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Some people think they’re just a vestige of a bygone era, but they’re not. In fact, nuclear weapons remain the everlasting threat they were when we first introduced them to planet earth: An existential nightmare wherein we possess the ability to obliterate our own planet, many times over, with the push of a button. So this week we have friend of the show and Motherboard contributor Matthew Gault to talk nukes. America’s arsenal is being updated; Russia has (probably) hypersonic missiles; and why since the Cold War have we collectively decided to forget about nuclear warheads. It’s not like they’ve gone anywhere!

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He’s a vigilante that goes by the alias Gamerdoc. He infiltrates secret online chatrooms to hunt down wrongdoing and the dishonest who prey upon and exploit the system. His target you might ask? The many cheating gamers out there who are using flawed code to be really good at titles like Valorant and Overwatch.here’s a huge underbelly of cheating gamers out there who trade and sell gaming cheat codes, the zero-days of the video gaming world, to get to God Mode without the hours of practice. Believe it or not, cheaters and hackers are a huge problem for gaming companies and today we have Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Francheschi Bicchierai on the show to tell us about the infamous cheater hunter, Gamerdoc.

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The US has accused Russia and China of trying to hack research groups that are working on a coronavirus vaccine. Is that a bad thing?

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Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai hosts this special episode of Cyber. He's joined by Joseph Cox, who reported on the Twitter hack that had the accounts of Elon Musk, Joe Biden, and Apple amongst others tweet out a cryptocurrency scam.

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It’s a tale as old as our digital era: Tech enthusiasts wanting to repair their devices without the authorization of the company that makes them. Apple, for example, is notoriously awful at allowing users access to easy fixes of iPhones or Macbooks and instead offers expensive options with one of its “geniuses.” And like everything in our society, the current pandemic has exposed these right to repairs practises for what they are: Ridiculous. Our Motherboard EIC Jason Koebler is here to tell us about a Polish hacker who is saving ventilators.

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It’s straight out of a hacking thriller: drug dealers. Murderers. Extortionists. Traffickers. Hit men. All using an encrypted network to openly talk about their illicit trades, amassing millions in messages. 

Then, like the magical hacks of a CSI cyber episode, the cops were in the network and went on the offensive.

In one of his wildest stories to date, and that’s saying something, we have the great Motherboard reporter Joseph Cox on the show this week to tell us all about his wild cybercrime scoop.

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It used to be that American hackers and the NSA were the unquestionable world’s best. Following the many revelations from the Snowden leaks, it became clear the U.S. government had not only violated the civil liberties of American citizens, but the NSA had done an excellent job hacking, well, everything. It hacked the phones of world leaders (including key allies) and made major geopolitical rivals China and Russia very nervous.

But, like everything else in the world, American hegemony in cyberspace has quickly faded as the proverbial American empire looks like it's in quick decline for a variety of obvious reasons. And when it comes to hacking powers across the world, it’s been widely reported that everyone from China to private mercenaries have caught up to the hacking skills of American hackers. 

So for our Independence Day edition of CYBER, Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Francheschi Bicchiarrai and host Ben Makuch are discussing America’s standing among the world powers of cyberspace.

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The US government is in a race with China to provide the world with 5G networks. Some call it the new arms race, as both Washington and Beijing go from country to country trying to negotiate for its companies to provide the future of the internet’s architecture. Part of that has been Trump himself slagging Huawei and undermining the Chinese company as national security risk: The allegation being the company would give the Chinese government a mainline into spying on countries across the world. While some experts agree those fears are well founded, some of the bravade is undoubtedly part of the game of geopolitics. Today on the show we have Andy Purdy, Chief Security Officer for Huawei Technologies USA, to discuss the concerns around the company’s technologies.

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On CYBER this week, we’re talking about a novel that frightfully depicts a not-so-distant future where FBI agents work with robot partners and terrorists meet up inside video games.

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Back in 2011 during Occupy Wall Street protests, a certain hacktivist collective truly came into its own. The years since Anonymous exploded in popularity and even became the constant pop culture reference point to all hacktivism or even, just hackers. But as we’ve discussed on the show, lately, it kind of seems to have disappeared. Until the latest Black Lives Matter protests seems to have kicked it back into the headlines. I got Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Francheschi Bicchierrai on the show to tell us more.

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Well, it’s a hell of a time to be alive. After a brutalizing pandemic, fit with stay at home orders and government indecision, something else happened. The cold blooded murder of unarmed black man George Floyd by a white cop in Minneapolis has set off unprecedent protests demanding racial equality and an end to police violence against people of color.

But instead of quelling these protests with actionable change, it appears the government is just spying on them. We’ve got evidence that now the infamous Military Industrial Complex and its surveillance superpowers are being deployed against protests across the country.

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If you’ve been listening to the news, chances are you’ve heard about it incessantly: contact tracing.

But what is it exactly? And what are the surveillance and privacy issues surrounding it? Will yet another app that tracks your movements really be the key to ending the pandemic?

Today we got Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Francheschi Bicchierai on the show to tell you everything you need to know about contact tracing.

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Since the dawn of the Patriot Act, a sweeping surveillance bill enacted shortly after 9/11, it’s been both the bane of privacy hawks and the favourite tool of the Intelligence Community. But lately, the Senate, courtesy of Mitch McConnell, helped the IC by giving agencies like the FBI the power to warrantlessly search the browser history of American citizens. That’s terrifying and today we’ve got Motherboard editor/reporter Janus Rose on to breakdown how this happened and what’s next.

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On the show, we talk a lot about the state of Orwellian world we’ve found ourselves in: big data, corporate and governmental surveillance. You know, Big Brother.

But where did it come from? What’s it’s historical context? To answer these questions, we have author and Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama, Lawrence Cappello on the show who wrote a book called None of Your Damn Business: Privacy in the United States from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age. In it he traces the over 100 year history of how the surveillance state came to be.

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In 2017, amidst the backdrop of the Mueller investigation and Russian spy paranoia, the world learned, via a New York Times bombshell, that the Pentagon had a top secret UFO program.

The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, AATIP for short, had a $22 million dollar black budget and looked into an aerial threat nobody could understand: UFOs. The details were terrifying, US fighter jet pilots regularly came into contact with other worldly flying objects that nobody understood.

There was mention of alien alloys and dark auras. Sci-fi had become reality. And possibly most striking of all? Highly respected Democratic Senator from Nevada Harry Reid, had been instrumental in the whole project. 

This week on CYBER Motherboard EIC spoke to Senator Reid, about why he believes in UFOs and why we need to consider them a possible threat worth investigating.

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Back in 2013, between the many revelations on mass surveillance abuses by the NSA coming from the trove of Snowden leaks, Americans also learned agents at the signals intelligence agency were snooping on their love interests. Dubbed LOVEINT (a play on ‘Love-Intelligence,’ apparently), a number of agents around the world were caught spying on their love interests using the godlike spy tools of the NSA. 

Now an employee from an infamous surveillance company was caught trying to do the exact same. According to four sources, a former employee of NSO Group—the surveillance firm out of Israel whose hacking technology was reportedly used on the phones of associates of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi—was caught using the company’s hacking tool to target a love interest.

While the controversial company did immediately fire the employee, it's yet another example of how powerful surveillance tools are still being abused by the very people entrusted with wielding them. Motherboard reporter Joseph Cox is on this week’s CYBER to discuss the story.

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The DNC hack. It was a tale of espionage and intrigue. But behind closed doors, Russian intelligence knew just how to play the media in a liberal democracy. And that is a tale as old as time.

Thomas Rid, a world renowned academic on national security and intelligence, wrote a new book called Active Measures tracing secret history psychological warfare over a century. On this week’s episode we have him on the show. 

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The mechanics of voting really hasn’t changed since the dawn of democracy. People line up, mark a ballot for their candidate and then leave.

But in today’s pandemic, the lines for the Wisconsin primary illustrated the legitimate dangers of having thousands of people line up with one another to vote. Likewise, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo delayed his state’s primaries from April to June for the same reason.

All of this forces us to ask the question: In an age where everything is done online, why aren’t we voting from our phones this November?

Of course, that brings in a ton of cybersecurity questions, so this week we have Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Franceschi Bicchierai on to discuss what that might actually look like.

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Hi Cyber listeners! Friendly podcast producer Ricardo here with a new bonus podcast from the Vice Audio team. The Distance features short, first-person stories from all over the world about how the pandemic is changing the way we live. We're sharing the "DJ set" episode on our feed for y'all, but you can click here for more!

Javi streams a two hour tropical set from his living room in Madrid. Check it out: https://tinyurl.com/s8f246v

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It was implicated in the hacking and spying of activists in Mexico. It may have helped the Saudis kill and behead Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Now, it’s inserting itself into the pandemic news as if it needed more bad press.

NSO Group, the infamous Israeli spyware company with links to intelligence agencies, developed software tracking coronavirus-infected citizens. But, as our Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Franceschi Bicchierai tells us, that’s likely just a way for it to expand its questionable business.

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This time of pandemic and social isolation is introducing a lot of new normals to us all. While we’re all holed up in our apartments, the need to interact with our friends and the outside world hasn’t just suddenly ended. In fact, people are FaceTiming and setting up Google Hangouts just to feel normal.

But one app, that I never even heard of until now, seems to be coming out on top as the choice video conferencing platform: Zoom. 

And its services have allowed us all to have chaotic Zoom parties with twelve friends screaming on top of each other. But as Motherboard's Joseph Cox has reported, the app, has a host of privacy issues.

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Right now, many people are sitting indoors quarantined from the world, stocked up on supplies and watching way too much Netflix. Some might even feel the impulse to order goods to their doorstep. So they fire up their Amazon Prime accounts and order some quarantine trinkets. 

Before this plague happened that whole process seemed completely normal. But behind that push of a button an entire workforce of Amazon workers, some with no health insurance or a union protecting their employment, are struggling through their orders knowing the virus is either in their fulfillment centers or is about to be. In fact, it already happened in New York City at one of Amazon’s Queen’s based warehouses: A worker fell ill with COVID-19, employees were sent out of the premises, the factory was then sprayed, and three hours later it was business as usual.

This week we’re talking to Lauren Kaori Gurley of Motherboard to discuss how the workers of Amazon, headed by the single richest man in the entire world, are faring during this very trying time.

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Yes, friends, this week’s CYBER podcast was recorded from the comfort of our apartments. Because, well, the global pandemic. 

Today on the show, we thought it would be important to discuss how coronavirus will affect state and corporate surveillance. Yes, because, like 9/11 and the quick enactment of the Patriot Act, there is already evidence of a boom for the spy industry. One company is advertising tech that leverages video surveillance software it says can spot people who have a fever, while the Israeli government has already given Shin Bet (its internal police agency) access to secretive cellular data to see who coronavirus positive patients have interacted with in an effort to stem the disease. 

In other words, sometimes companies react to crises by exploiting a business opportunity and governments might look to increase their Big Brother powers. Motherboard editor-in-chief Jason Koebler joins host Ben Makuch on the show.

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It’s cliche to say it, but it’s true, we’re living in a frighteningly similar world to George Orwell’s 1984. Where it’s not just people that are spies, but everything can be a spy. And people are making money off of it to fuel this Big Brother world. It’s a panopticon of mass surveillance and here at Motherboard, Jason Koebler and Emanuel Maiberg broke the news of yet another company hawking its dystopian services.

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In late 2014, North Korean hackers made their blockbuster debut in popular culture after the infamous Sony hack. It was one of those watershed cybersecurity moments when a hacking story finally dominated news headlines with a made for Hollywood plot: A Seth Rogen stoner comedy catching the ire of the Hermit Kingdom so much so that Kim Jong Un deployed his team of skillful hackers to embarrass the movie company that made the film. 

Even when the NSA confirmed North Korea was the culprit, people still openly wondered how a country virtually shut off from world markets by a series of international sanctions and with less than 1 percent of its population actually on the internet, could afford or train elite hackers?

But then North Korean hackers struck again by allegedly creating the globally impactful WannaCry ransomware attack in 2017, and then yet again by apparently stealing money from a South Korean cryptocurrency exchange not long after that—further showing that the country is a hacking threat.

On today’s CYBER we have Shannon Vavra from CyberScoop News, who covers geopolitics and cyberwarfare, to talk about what North Korean hackers are up to these days and how the U.S. government is responding to them.

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It used to be that if you wanted to interact with your favourite celebrity you’d have to do elaborate things like camp out near a red carpet in Hollywood, lying in wait, until you finally got the chance to scream-ask Queen Bey for her autograph amongst a gaggle of other fans.

Well, in 2020, like everything else in this world, including our dating lives, our health, and voting there’s an app for paying celebrities to give you personalized shoutout videos. That’s right, the app Cameo provides you a list of celebrities ranging from Snoop Dogg to Michael Rappaport, that you can select, pay, and then receive everything from a personalized ‘happy birthday’ to a ‘get well soon’ from your favourite celeb. 

But through a flaw in its website's design, a security researcher discovered that many of these personal videos were available to anyone, including those that had been set to 'private'. Motherboard then wrote code to find the private videos en masse.

Joseph Cox, Motherboard reporter of cybercrime and sketchiness extraordinaire, tells CYBER how he broke the story and got Gilbert Gotfried to verify the flaw on Cameo’s site with a personal message using that lovable voice of his.

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When we think of the titans of industry, we used to think of names like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt. But today, in 2020, we have new names that dominate the world economy: Zuckerberg, Cook, Musk, and Thiel. Above them stands one man: Jeff Bezos. Although those names control industries that are less obvious than the sprouting giant steel bridges or skyscrapers of the Second Industrial Revolution, their products arguably have just as big of an impact on our lives.

Silicon Valley has become the epicenter of innovation and industry, where apps and devices dictate what our very society looks like. But lately, the sheen is coming off of these monolithic, billion-dollar companies.

And while giants like Facebook have faced questions about how its platform was used to manipulate our political system and Apple has been criticised for its abusive labor practices in China, one company is only recently coming under the collective microscope: Amazon.

Jeff Bezos’ empire has enjoyed a meteoric rise. And now, Amazon has become one of the most powerful, single corporate entities in the entire world. But what does that mean for all of us?

In an excellent new documentary for PBS’s FRONTLINE, journalist James Jacoby examines Amazon with a fine toothed-comb. From its treatment of its factory workers, Ring, to Alexa, and asking the same question throughout: Has Amazon gone too far? This week, we have Jacoby on the show to tell us more.

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Luxury cars, like everything else in this entire world, including sex toys, pacemakers, firearms, the electric grid, and ISIS, can be hacked. But most people aren't hackers, which is why a device that can automatically hack a keyless entry vehicle by the push of a button is quite useful for car thieves

The so-called “relay attack” is ideal for the era of increasingly digitized vehicles, requires something called a “keyless repeater” to fake the signal of the keys to a targeted car and ultimately gain entry. After that, it’s as easy as what Whiz Khalifa once said in his famous song "Black & Yellow’:" No keys, push to start.

And the keyless repeater is sold online for a few thousand dollars by a man who goes by the alias “EvanConnect” who shared a video of the whole process with Motherboard reporter Joseph Cox. It turns out that his device can specifically be used to hack snazzy cars made by upscale companies like Mercedes Benz, Rolls Royce, and Fiat. 

This week on CYBER, Cox is back on the show to tell us about this whole sketch relay attack and how it all works.

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On this week's CYBER Cipher, we have Breaking News about the app that delayed the Iowa Caucus results, how it was made, and the company that made it.

But first: it’s finally here. And I know it’s slightly off brand, But. I. Do. Not. Care. Because, who needs cybersecurity when aliens could exist? THEY COULD INVADE? Whatever they are or could be, here at Motherboard we have one of the best reporters on the UFO beat on the planet, MJ Banias. And recently he’s done some groundbreaking reporting on, well, aliens. But he’s done it in such a way that has peaked the interest of skeptics and made something that is normally thought to be conspiracy theory fodder, something to take seriously.

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The Dark Web has been around for as long as the internet has existed, but most people still don't know what it actually is. From easily obtained illicit drugs to rumors of cannibalism and human trafficking, it's been difficult for the average person to separate fact from fiction. On this week's Cyber, we've invited VP of Research at Terbium Labs and Dark Web expert Emily Wilson to talk us through what the Dark Web actually is, a few of its most infamous websites, and how it's a part of more people's everyday lives.

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In a special breaking edition of Cyber Cipher, Joseph Cox sits down with us to go over the alleged hacking of Jeff Bezos' phone by Saudi Arabia. After the break we have one of Motherboard’s newest reporters on the Uber beat, Edward Ongweso Jr., to tell us all about Uber and its troubles. When Uber truly came onto the scene in the mid-2010s it completely up ended an entire, century-old cab industry. And revolutionized the way we pay for taxis, how we hail them and how we interact with them. But behind the thin-veneer of a shiny, billion dollar rideshare company is a host of real problems from employment standards to driver abuses.

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At its height, the hacktivist collective known as Anonymous was the bane of Scientologists, the FBI, CIA, Mastercard, Paypal, Middle Eastern dictatorships, and in its latest effective iterations, even ISIS.

But in recent years, Anonymous has all but disappeared. It leaves a legacy: It single-handedly brought back the Guy Fawkes mask as a true symbol of civil disobedience, was the obvious inspiration for the hit TV show Mr. Robot, and is also associated with all sorts of more nefarious and negative aspects of trolling culture. In its wake, hacktivism hasn’t dried up altogether, either, with entities like Phineas Fisher still making headlines and taking up its mantle as an online vigilante force challenging the powerful.

This week on CYBER we have Biella Coleman, a professor of anthropology at McGill University in Montreal who wrote the comprehensive book on the group—Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous—to talk about what became of the infamous collective. 

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If you’re at all plugged into the global news cycle, you’ll know the U.S. assassinated Iran’s General Qassem Soleimani, a commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and leader of the secretive Quds Force.

Since that night, experts have been wondering what the blowback from Tehran will be. Naturally, in the age of cyberwarfare, people are getting pretty worried about the threat of Iranian hackers, who, if you were to believe some newscasts, are practically hiding in your modem.

There are some real and some overblown threats from Iranian hackers now facing the U.S. In fact, the Department of Homeland Security issued a warning that it was logging increased cyberattacks emanating from the Iranian regime on American networks.

But how worried should we be?

On this week’s CYBER we have Motherboard reporter Joseph Cox who is already tracking alleged Iranian hackers defacing American websites, to discuss what Tehran’s hackers are actually capable of hacking.

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On this week's CYBER we're re-upping our longform interview of none other than Mr. Edward Snowden, a person who might've affected the infosec world more than any singular human over the last decade. We'll be back next week with a fresh new episode for our 2020 season.

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