CYBER

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 re...

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 th...

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? Thi...

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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’...

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 u...

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...

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 thi...

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 thos...

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 b...

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 hu...

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 decentr...

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 pa...

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 Ke...

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 ha...

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...

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 l...

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...

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...

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...