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 n...
Aug 23, 2022•42 min
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 g...
Aug 18, 2022•48 min
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 ...
Aug 15, 2022•32 min
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 spec...
Aug 11, 2022•45 min
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...
Aug 09, 2022•32 min
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 Lar...
Aug 04, 2022•39 min
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 Senio...
Aug 02, 2022•36 min
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 t...
Jul 29, 2022•31 min
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 decide...
Jul 26, 2022•48 min
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 s...
Jul 21, 2022•37 min
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 Mos...
Jul 19, 2022•36 min
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...
Jul 13, 2022•36 min
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’...
Jul 07, 2022•37 min
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 ...
Jul 06, 2022•34 min
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 epis...
Jun 30, 2022•53 min
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 abou...
Jun 28, 2022•35 min
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 inte...
Jun 23, 2022•43 min
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 th...
Jun 16, 2022•36 min
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 o...
Jun 14, 2022•44 min
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 tu...
Jun 09, 2022•43 min
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 decentraliz...
Jun 07, 2022•45 min
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, i...
May 31, 2022•33 min
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?...
May 26, 2022•36 min
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 u...
May 25, 2022•40 min
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 ...
May 19, 2022•33 min
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...
May 17, 2022•48 min
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—...
May 12, 2022•34 min
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 thi...
May 10, 2022•39 min
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 dow...
May 05, 2022•36 min
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 th...
May 03, 2022•33 min
