Cyber Casts

Audio deepfakes are getting more convincing than ever. To test this out, we’ve replaced our host Ben Makuch with a robotic clone of himself. Sponsored by NeXt. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

A thriller about a Silicon Valley pioneer who joins forces with a Special Agent to stop the A.I. he created from destroying humanity. Starting October 6th, NEXT airs every Tuesday at 9/8c on FOX. On this episode of Cyber, in partnership with FOX, we sit down with the show’s creator Manny Coto to talk about the inspiration for this thriller A.I. Coto’s history as a horror and science fiction writer is on display in NEXT. He got the idea for his show about a rogue AI when a smart device in his home started to malfunction and call out in the middle of the night. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

It’s been a pretty bad PR year for the world’s most popular ride-share app… And unsurprisingly it has poured money into good news stories, to kick up warm fuzzy feelings about a company that has been found, time and again, to not care very much about its drivers.Enter a CNBC paid partnership story about an UberEats driver who is about to make 100k a year. The American Dream, right? Not so, says Motherboard reporter Edward Ongweso who broke down the falsities of this rather suspect piece of news. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Since the War on Terror kicked off, the military and spy industrial complex has boomed. That also includes a growth in the literal number of spies from agencies like the NSA and CIA, all serving tours, then often entering the private sector. Since then, we’ve seen how things like corporate espionage and the techniques multibillion dollar entities deploy in their interests, have seriously taken off from the trickle down of said veterans entering the workforce Now, we’re in a situation where everybody uses techniques like social media monitoring to glean intel into their own businesses. Recently, in the case of Amazon that means carrying out a fairly professional surveillance op on its own workers. Motherboard’s Lauren Gurley has the story. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

It almost reads like a dystopian plot from a sci-fi novel, playing out in the not-so-distant future. A major world government relies on a defective and cruel algorithm for debt collection, to extort money out of its most vulnerable citizens who were already on social assistance. Or to put it more succinctly: state-sponsored shakedowns via Artificial Intelligence, that ends up being so flawed it results in the country taking hundreds of millions of dollars from its own people.Sounds unreal, right? Well, this actually happened in Australia, a major country with a huge economic footprint around the world. For more on the story we’ve got Motherboard editor and Jordan Pearson on CYBER. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The tale started with an encrypted phone company, Morroccan gangsters, the Scottish mafia, and a blogger. It ended with an assassination outside of a sex club in Amsterdam.Last week, Motherboard reporter Joseph Cox broke the news that MPC—a Scottish company that hawked special encrypted phones that could evade police surveillance—had been connected to the murder of crime blogger Martin Kok. Kok was a former criminal himself who had previously served a jail sentence for two murders.Kok’s crime blogging had gotten him on the wrong side of the Gillespie brothers, two Scots who are still operating a highly sophisticated drug and gun running operation connected to South American cartels, as well as Morroccan gangster associates. They allegedly hatched a successful plan to kill him in December 2016.On this week’s episode of CYBER, Cox goes into detail about how this criminal syndicate carried out Kok's murder, and what it means for crime in 2019 when the mafia isn’t buying encrypted phones, but making them for

Content Warning: Descriptions of Sexually Explicit ActsIntroducing VENT Documentaries from VICE UK: Young people from London, telling you the stories they care about. In this episode, Khalil grew up with homophobic parents, so he had to learn about being gay on his own. From making Sims characters have gay sex to signing up to online sexting forums, Khalil tells the sometimes hilarious, sometimes graphic and sometimes painful story of what it’s like to come into your queerness on the internet. Subscribe to VENT Documentaries wherever you listen to podcasts:Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/7FpQDTtYnVsCvztk3wmflPApple: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/vent-documentaries/id1501178221 Acast: play.acast.com/s/ventdocumentaries See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

By the year 2000 people started believing, in the advent of widespread email culture, that the United States Postal Service was doomed. Conservatives and business types argued that it was a bloated institution.But it’s not. In fact, it’s a vital, robust network that is literally a failsafe in the doomsday plans of the federal government. These days, while people may not be sending many letters or postcards, the USPS is an essential service helping us vote, get our medicine and deliver us packages. President Trump isn’t a fan. But Motherboard reporter Aaron Gordon is, and he’s on the show this week to tell us more about the future of the Postal Service.He's also just launched a newsletter, The Mail, which is all about the USPS. You can subscribe to The Mail by entering your email address at vice.com/themail. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Some people think they’re just a vestige of a bygone era, but they’re not. In fact, nuclear weapons remain the everlasting threat they were when we first introduced them to planet earth: An existential nightmare wherein we possess the ability to obliterate our own planet, many times over, with the push of a button. So this week we have friend of the show and Motherboard contributor Matthew Gault to talk nukes. America’s arsenal is being updated; Russia has (probably) hypersonic missiles; and why since the Cold War have we collectively decided to forget about nuclear warheads. It’s not like they’ve gone anywhere! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

He’s a vigilante that goes by the alias Gamerdoc. He infiltrates secret online chatrooms to hunt down wrongdoing and the dishonest who prey upon and exploit the system. His target you might ask? The many cheating gamers out there who are using flawed code to be really good at titles like Valorant and Overwatch.here’s a huge underbelly of cheating gamers out there who trade and sell gaming cheat codes, the zero-days of the video gaming world, to get to God Mode without the hours of practice. Believe it or not, cheaters and hackers are a huge problem for gaming companies and today we have Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Francheschi Bicchierai on the show to tell us about the infamous cheater hunter, Gamerdoc. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The US has accused Russia and China of trying to hack research groups that are working on a coronavirus vaccine. Is that a bad thing? See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai hosts this special episode of Cyber. He's joined by Joseph Cox, who reported on the Twitter hack that had the accounts of Elon Musk, Joe Biden, and Apple amongst others tweet out a cryptocurrency scam. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

It’s a tale as old as our digital era: Tech enthusiasts wanting to repair their devices without the authorization of the company that makes them. Apple, for example, is notoriously awful at allowing users access to easy fixes of iPhones or Macbooks and instead offers expensive options with one of its “geniuses.” And like everything in our society, the current pandemic has exposed these right to repairs practises for what they are: Ridiculous. Our Motherboard EIC Jason Koebler is here to tell us about a Polish hacker who is saving ventilators. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

It’s straight out of a hacking thriller: drug dealers. Murderers. Extortionists. Traffickers. Hit men. All using an encrypted network to openly talk about their illicit trades, amassing millions in messages. Then, like the magical hacks of a CSI cyber episode, the cops were in the network and went on the offensive.In one of his wildest stories to date, and that’s saying something, we have the great Motherboard reporter Joseph Cox on the show this week to tell us all about his wild cybercrime scoop. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

It used to be that American hackers and the NSA were the unquestionable world’s best. Following the many revelations from the Snowden leaks, it became clear the U.S. government had not only violated the civil liberties of American citizens, but the NSA had done an excellent job hacking, well, everything. It hacked the phones of world leaders (including key allies) and made major geopolitical rivals China and Russia very nervous.But, like everything else in the world, American hegemony in cyberspace has quickly faded as the proverbial American empire looks like it's in quick decline for a variety of obvious reasons. And when it comes to hacking powers across the world, it’s been widely reported that everyone from China to private mercenaries have caught up to the hacking skills of American hackers. So for our Independence Day edition of CYBER, Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Francheschi Bicchiarrai and host Ben Makuch are discussing America’s standing among the world powers of cyberspace. See acast.com/priva

The US government is in a race with China to provide the world with 5G networks. Some call it the new arms race, as both Washington and Beijing go from country to country trying to negotiate for its companies to provide the future of the internet’s architecture. Part of that has been Trump himself slagging Huawei and undermining the Chinese company as national security risk: The allegation being the company would give the Chinese government a mainline into spying on countries across the world. While some experts agree those fears are well founded, some of the bravade is undoubtedly part of the game of geopolitics. Today on the show we have Andy Purdy, Chief Security Officer for Huawei Technologies USA, to discuss the concerns around the company’s technologies. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On CYBER this week, we’re talking about a novel that frightfully depicts a not-so-distant future where FBI agents work with robot partners and terrorists meet up inside video games. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Back in 2011 during Occupy Wall Street protests, a certain hacktivist collective truly came into its own. The years since Anonymous exploded in popularity and even became the constant pop culture reference point to all hacktivism or even, just hackers. But as we’ve discussed on the show, lately, it kind of seems to have disappeared. Until the latest Black Lives Matter protests seems to have kicked it back into the headlines. I got Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Francheschi Bicchierrai on the show to tell us more. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Well, it’s a hell of a time to be alive. After a brutalizing pandemic, fit with stay at home orders and government indecision, something else happened. The cold blooded murder of unarmed black man George Floyd by a white cop in Minneapolis has set off unprecedent protests demanding racial equality and an end to police violence against people of color.But instead of quelling these protests with actionable change, it appears the government is just spying on them. We’ve got evidence that now the infamous Military Industrial Complex and its surveillance superpowers are being deployed against protests across the country. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

If you’ve been listening to the news, chances are you’ve heard about it incessantly: contact tracing.But what is it exactly? And what are the surveillance and privacy issues surrounding it? Will yet another app that tracks your movements really be the key to ending the pandemic?Today we got Motherboard reporter Lorenzo Francheschi Bicchierai on the show to tell you everything you need to know about contact tracing. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.