Lock and Code

Pay is personal for plenty of Americans, but a new distribution model that consumes vast quantities of worker data is turning pay into something else: personalized. For an increasing number of workers in America, the money they can expect to be paid on any given day, week, or month is unknown to them. They could work the same number of hours as they did the shift before. They could help the same n...

If you weren’t taking deepfakes seriously before, it’s too late now to ignore them. According to new research from Malwarebytes , one in three people who use AI every day said it’s okay to generate pornography of people without their consent. Nearly 10 years ago, “deepfake” technology provided hobbyists and film editors with artificial intelligence (AI) tools to swap the face of one person onto th...

In the United States today, you can have your bank account closed, your credit cards cancelled, and your online payments revoked for any number of crimes, like funding terrorism, engaging in money laundering, or violating sanctions. Sensible, right? Well, you can also face financial ruin for teaching poetry. That’s what seemingly happened to a Persian poetry teacher from Detroit whose accounts wer...

In May of last year, a warning about AI came from somewhere unexpected: The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Posting publicly on social media, the museum warned about a Facebook account using generative AI to create fake images of people who died in the Holocaust. The people in said images were sometimes real—with real names, birthplaces, and stories of deportation that the Auschwitz-Birkenau Stat...

Your prices could be going up because of a little something that one group has started calling the “cyber tax.” Not a “tax” in any regulatory sense of the word, this newly named “cyber tax” is instead a consequence of the growing number of cyberattacks on small businesses. According to the latest research from the Identity Theft Resource Center, 81% of small- and medium-sized businesses suffered a...

A dreadful thing happens far too often whenever an older adult falls for a scam: They get blamed for it. Not the scammers who lied and cheated their victim out of money. Not law enforcement for failing to recover funds. Not even the Big Tech companies that could have the most important role in protecting people online—and which, it turns out,  knowingly bring in revenue every year from fraud...

Big news : Lock and Code is nominated for a Webby Award! You can  help us win the People’s Voice Award by voting here . --- We have to talk about killer robots. No, not the Terminator, and not some  Boston Dynamics robot run amok . We have to talk instead about a technological reality that is very much already here. In late February, the artificial intelligence developer Anthropic made a...

Forget the runaway train thrillingly shot in Buster Keaton’s 1926 film “The General,” and never mind the charging locomotive rescued by actors Denzel Washington and Chris Pine in the 2010 film “Unstoppable,” as there’s a far more frequent (and far less heart-pounding) railcar drama happening across California’s Bay Area: The repeated breakdown of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system, all becau...

On February 8, during the Super Bowl in the United States, countless owners of one of the most popular smart products today got a bit of a wakeup call: Their Ring doorbells could be used to see a whole lot more than they knew. In a commercial that was broadcast to one of most reliably enormous audiences in the country, Amazon, which owns the company Ring, promoted a new feature for its smart doorb...

A funny thing happened on TikTok last month, and its brought allegations of censorship, manipulation, and control. It was the week of January 22, and after a long legal battle, TikTok had finally—for the first time in its company history—moved its ownership to new, American stewards. But with the American restructuring,  TikTok users immediately reported that  something  had changed...

In January, Google settled a lawsuit that pricked up a few ears: It agreed to  pay $68 million  to a wide array of people who sued the company together, alleging that Google’s voice-activated smart assistant had secretly recorded their conversations, which were then sent to advertisers to target them with promotions. Google denied any admission of wrongdoing in the settlement agreement,...

When you hear the words “data privacy,” what do you first imagine? Maybe you picture going into your social media apps and setting your profile and posts to private. Maybe you think about who you’ve shared your location with and deciding to revoke some of that access. Maybe you want to remove a few apps entirely from your smartphone, maybe you want to try a new web browser, maybe you even want to...

There’s a bizarre thing happening online right now where everything is getting worse. Your Google results have become so bad that you’ve likely typed what you’re looking for, plus the word “Reddit,” so you can find discussion from actual humans. If you didn’t take this route, you might get served AI results from Google Gemini, which once recommended that every person should eat “ at least one smal...

There’s an entire surveillance network popping up across the United States that has likely already captured your information, all for the non-suspicion of driving a car. Automated License Plate Readers, or ALPRs, are AI-powered cameras that scan and store an image of every single vehicle that passes their view. They are mounted onto street lights, installed under bridges, disguised in water barrel...

This is the story of the world’s worst scam and how it is being used to fuel entire underground economies that have the power to rival nation-states across the globe. This is the story of “pig butchering.” “Pig butchering” is a violent term that is used to describe a growing type of online investment scam that has ruined the lives of countless victims all across the world. No age group is spared,...

It’s often said online that if a product is free, you’re the product, but what if that bargain was no longer true? What if, depending on the device you paid hard-earned money for, you  still  became a product yourself, to be measured, anonymized, collated, shared, or sold, often away from view? In 2024, a consumer rights group out of the UK teased this new reality when it published resea...

Everything’s easier with AI… except having to correct it. In just the three years since OpenAI released ChatGPT, not only has onlife life changed at home—it’s also changed at work. Some of the biggest software companies today, like Microsoft and Google, are forwarding a vision of an AI-powered future where people don’t write their own emails anymore, or make their own slide decks for presentations...

In the final, cold winter months of the year, ChatGPT could be heating up. On October 14, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that the “restrictions” that his company previously placed on their flagship product, ChatGPT, would be removed, allowing, perhaps, for “erotica” in the future. “We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues,” Altman  wrote on t...

Google is everywhere in our lives. It’s reach into our data extends just as far. After investigating  how much data Facebook had collected about him in his nearly 20 years with the platform , Lock and Code host David Ruiz had similar questions about the other Big Tech platforms in his life, and this time, he turned his attention to Google. Google dominates much of the modern web. It has a sea...

“Connection” was the promise—and goal—of much of the early internet. No longer would people be separated from vital resources and news that was either too hard to reach or made simply inaccessible by governments. No longer would education be guarded behind walls both physical and paid. And no longer would your birthplace determine so much about the path of your life, as the internet could connect...

There’s more about you online than you know. The company Acxiom, for example, has probably determined whether you’re a heavy drinker, or if you’re overweight, or if you smoke (or all three). The same company has also probably estimated—to the exact dollar—the amount you spend every year on dining out, donating to charities, and traveling domestically. Another company Experian, has probably made a...

In the late 2010s, a group of sheriffs out of Pasco County, Florida, believed they could predict crime. The Sheriff’s Department there had piloted a program called “Intelligence-Led Policing” and the program would allegedly analyze disparate points of data to identify would-be criminals. But in reality, the program didn’t so much predict crime, as it did make criminals out of everyday people, incl...

If there’s one thing that scam hunter Julie-Anne Kearns wants everyone to know, it is that no one is immune from a scam. And she would know—she fell for one last year. For years now, Kearns has made a name for herself on TikTok as a scam awareness and education expert. Popular under the name  @staysafewithmjules , Kearns makes videos about scam identification and defense. She has posted count...

The internet is cracking apart. It’s exactly what some politicians want. In June, a Texas law that requires age verification on certain websites withstood a legal challenge brought all the way to the US Supreme Court. It could be a blueprint for how the internet will change very soon. The law,  titled HB 1181  and passed in 2023, places new requirements on websites that portray or depict...

For decades, digital rights activists, technologists, and cybersecurity experts have worried about what would happen if the US government secretly broke into people’s encrypted communications. The weird thing, though, is that it's already happened—sort of. US intelligence agencies, including the FBI and NSA, have long sought what is called a “backdoor” into the secure and private messages that are...