Chaos Lever Podcast

If your Gmail inbox is older than your adult children and you're just now wondering if it's been reading your diary all along—congrats, this episode is for you! In part two of our “Living Life Without Being Poisoned by FAANG” series, we deep-dive into the world's most insidious search bar: Google. From ads masquerading as results to docs that double as AI training material, we unpack how the adver...

Here's another Tech News of the Week for y'all! Stay tuned for our weekly full episode where we'll big talking about how you can ditch Google for something better (and no the irony of publishing this on YouTube is not lost on me 😅). 💣Microsoft drops a suspicious folder on your C drive and tells you not to touch it. Sounds totally normal and not ominous at all. Turns out, if you delete the new `C...

Are your bones creaking? Is your back mysteriously acquiring new joints just to ache in fresh and exciting ways? Welcome to adulthood—and welcome back to Chaos Lever. In this episode, Ned and Chris dive into the literal pain of aging and the metaphorical pain of living under the digital thumbs of FAANG companies. We’re talking Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google—and how to maybe, just may...

In this week’s episode of *Tech News of the Week*, we’re talking about source control history, cyber cover-ups, licensing shenanigans, and encryption for the quantum future. It’s a spicy lineup, and we’re here for all of it. 🧑‍💻 Git just turned 20! That’s right, the tool most developers have a love-hate relationship with hit the big two-oh. Originally built by Linus Torvalds after he got fed up...

This week’s main dish? Agentic AI and the Model Context Protocol (MCP). What the heck do those mean? Why are they being compared to USB-C? And why should you care unless you’re an executive with a robot butler? Ned breaks it all down while Chris offers the occasional therapy check-in. Spoiler alert: MCP is the plumbing behind smarter AI assistants, but whether we trust them with our calendar (or o...

This week we talk lawsuits, leaks, and legacy code—all wrapped in Kubernetes vulnerabilities and good ol' DNS doom. It's everything you didn't know you needed to hear, and more. Let's dive in: 🧠 TikTok is getting slammed with a €500 million fine from the Irish Data Protection Commission for casually throwing GDPR into the sea. The Tok (yes, we're calling it that now) has been caught red-handed sh...

This week on Chaos Lever, we take a detour through a moldy book, moldy cheese, and somehow land at a celebration of women in tech history. Because that’s how this show works. We kick things off with a hot take on Who Moved My Cheese? and an uncomfortably enthusiastic ode to Gorgonzola, then accidentally spiral into a cinematic sadness spiral featuring Robin Williams. You’re welcome? From there, it...

It's a wild week in tech and we're taking you on a ride through the most ridiculous and revealing stories from the digital frontier. Buckle up. 🎵 Remember Napster? Of course you do. It was the soundtrack to many of our teenage years, sneaking MP3s over college Ethernet networks and dodging Metallica-shaped lawsuits. Well, guess what? It's back... again. Sort of. Another Web3 company has paid *$20...

Biden’s executive order on AI safety was 111 pages of not-terrible ideas like protecting privacy and creating AI guidelines. Naturally, big tech was *not* a fan. Because when you ask Meta and Google to behave responsibly, they act like you just insulted their mom. Meanwhile in Europe: The EU held its AI Action Summit in Paris, making it clear they’re not messing around with AI governance. Public i...

This week we get into Facebook's ongoing saga of being the actual worst, a massive Google acquisition, some shady AI data scraping, and why the FCC is basically handing over rural America’s internet to the wolves. Buckle up. 📘 Facebook is Literally the Worst, Part One: Leadership Edition  Mark Zuckerberg tries to suppress a former Facebook exec’s memoir, *Careless People*, and accidentally Streis...

We’ve got bruised shins, sketchy USB drives, and a surprisingly judgmental cat—so you know it’s a classic Chaos Lever episode. This week, Chris walks us through the wonderfully terrible 2015 movie *Blackhat*, a film that tried really hard to be tech-savvy and instead gave us Thor doing cybercrimes. Ned’s never seen it, which is great, because now he gets to be appalled in real time. Join us as we...

🚀 Welcome back to Tech News of the Week, where Chris and I break down the biggest, weirdest, and occasionally most questionable tech stories from the past week. 🧪 **D-Wave’s Dubious Quantum Supremacy Claim**  D-Wave is back at it again, this time claiming "quantum supremacy" (insert dramatic echo here). They say their quantum chip solved a complex magnetic field simulation in 20 minutes—somethin...

This week on Chaos Lever, we explore a heartwarming yet launch into an in-depth (and completely correct, don’t question us) discussion about quantum computing and the hardware solutions behind a qubit. 🧠⚛️  Google, IBM, Amazon, and even Microsoft have been making big moves in quantum tech, each promising advancements that may or may not totally destroy encryption as we know it. Superconducting qu...

Welcome to another round of tech news! This week, we're diving into the resurrection of a once-popular social media site, the EU's big bet on RISC-V, fresh zero days for VMware, and Broadcom's bold money-making moves. 🎯 **Reddit's Co-Founder Wants to Fix Social Media... With More Social Media?**  Alexis Ohanian, one of Reddit’s original creators (the one who *doesn’t* suck), is teaming up with th...

The Internet: it was never supposed to work this well, and yet, here we are. This week, we’re diving into how we went from isolated, room-sized computers to a global, decentralized network that somehow (mostly) functions. We break down the early days of networking, when computers had to physically dial each other up, and how we eventually arrived at the distributed, self-healing, packet-switching...

📢 Welcome to another episode of Tech News of the Week, where Chris and I break down the biggest stories in tech—sometimes with insight, sometimes with sarcasm, but always with desks. Maybe? This week, we're talking about IBM finally sealing the deal with HashiCorp, Microsoft's continued Notepad nonsense, OpenAI's latest attempt to justify its existence, and the biggest crypto heist of all time. B...

Fifth-generation programming languages? Generations don’t even matter anymore. We’re basically at iPhone generation 16-and-a-half, and at some point, people are just making stuff up. Speaking of making things up, today’s episode of Chaos Lever is all about NAT (Network Address Translation), a necessary evil—or maybe just evil—that helped shape the internet as we know it. To break it all down, we’r...

Welcome back to Tech News of the Week, where Chris and I break down the biggest and weirdest stories in tech. We're a week behind because Chris decided to lose power—how selfish! But we’re back, and we’ve got four spicy news stories to dive into. Let’s go!   🧠 **Meta Wants ARM-Made Chips**   ARM might start making its own chips, and Meta is reportedly first in line to buy them. This is a big shif...

What happens when you mix cryptography, heists, social engineering, and a dash of early '90s tech paranoia? You get **Sneakers**—a movie that might be more relevant today than it was in 1992. In this episode, we break down the film’s tech, its realism (or lack thereof), and the undeniable truth that **people are always the weakest security link**. Because at the end of the day, it’s not about the...

Welcome back to another jam-packed episode of Tech News of the Week! Chris and I are diving into four big stories that caught our attention this week. From sketchy ISP routers to OpenAI’s latest security fail, let’s break it all down.   🔹 **Stop Using Your ISP Router—Seriously**   If you're still using the router your internet provider gave you, it's time for an upgrade. Not only are ISP-provided...

Can you feel the enthusiasm radiating from this episode? No? Well, Chris is already singing *The Lion King*, so we’re off to a strong start. Today, we’re diving headfirst into the world of AI with DeepSeek, the latest generative AI model out of China that’s supposedly shaking up Silicon Valley. Is it really the *Sputnik moment* some are claiming, or is it just another overhyped step forward? Spoil...

Welcome back to another episode of *Tech News of the Week!* This week, we dive into some fascinating developments in quantum computing, corporate drama at Meta, a potential shake-up in the networking industry, and security vulnerabilities in Apple Silicon chips. Buckle up—it's going to be a wild ride.   🔬 **Photonics for Quantum Computing**   Quantum computers are finicky beasts, usually requirin...

Welcome to another episode of Chaos Lever, where we take a deep dive into the tech abyss and come out slightly more confused than when we started. This week, we're talking about the OG of directory services: X.500. Before Active Directory, before LDAP, there was this ambitious yet painfully cumbersome attempt to organize networked systems into a structured directory. Was it elegant? No. Was it pra...

Welcome to this week’s **Tech News of the Week**! 📰 Chris and Ned dive into four fascinating stories from the tech world that made us scratch our heads, laugh, and maybe even fear the AI overlords just a little. Let's break it down:   ✨ TikTok’s Secret Sauce Want to know how TikTok seems to know you better than you know yourself? We explore a research paper that gives us a peek into TikTok's gam...

Welcome to the Chaos Lever podcast! In this episode, we're sharing some of our favorite (and most cringe-worthy) disaster recovery stories as Chris and I relive our days in the IT trenches. From accidentally shutting down a whole data center with the push of a button to a missing utility server derailing an entire cloud migration, we’ve seen it all. If you’ve ever wondered how NOT to handle DR or...