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 promise...
Dec 03, 2021•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 pa...
Nov 23, 2021•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Nov 19, 2021•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 G...
Nov 18, 2021•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Nov 11, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ques...
Nov 02, 2021•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Oct 29, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Oct 27, 2021•1 hr 13 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 t...
Oct 27, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Oct 27, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Oct 22, 2021•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 o...
Oct 21, 2021•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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-Traf...
Oct 14, 2021•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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. Hosted on Acast. See a...
Oct 07, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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. Hosted on Acas...
Oct 06, 2021•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Oct 04, 2021•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 checki...
Sep 30, 2021•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 extensiv...
Sep 28, 2021•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 cybersecuri...
Sep 23, 2021•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Sep 16, 2021•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 acc...
Sep 09, 2021•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Sep 02, 2021•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 t...
Aug 26, 2021•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Aug 19, 2021•16 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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. Host...
Aug 12, 2021•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 spy...
Aug 05, 2021•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Jul 29, 2021•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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:...
Jul 22, 2021•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 pe...
Jul 15, 2021•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 hav...
Jul 08, 2021•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
