Stay ConnectedHacking. Hackers. Disinformation campaigns. Encryption. The Cyber. This stuff gets complicated really fast, but Motherboard spends its time embedded in the infosec world so you don’t have to. Host Matthew Gault talks every week to Motherboard reporters about the stories they’re breaking and to the industry’s most famous hackers and researchers about the biggest news in cybersecurity.
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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.
Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
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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
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.
Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
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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.
Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
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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
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.
Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
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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.
Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
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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
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.
Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
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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.
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.
Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
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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.
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.
Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your 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.
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.
Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
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