CYBER

Deadly storms swept through parts of the U.S. last Friday, killing at least 90 people. Six of those worked in an Amazon warehouse in Illinois. As the deadly tornado hit the warehouse, the walls fell inward, the roof collapsed. Moments before his death, worker Larry Virden texted his girlfriend to say “Amazon won’t let us leave.” If you’ve ever worked retail or shipping during the holidays, you kno...

In which we go deep on ConstitutionDAO, and DAOs in general. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 lea...

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 c...

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...

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-repa...

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 S...

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 . W...

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.

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, wh...

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 Koebl...

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 releas...

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/pr...

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...

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 edito...

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...

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 un...

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. W...

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 y...

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 proje...

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...

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 coi...

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 authentic...

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 h...

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 hango...