CYBER

Reply guys. Maybe you’ve got one, maybe you are one. If you’re a public person online, and especially if you’re a woman, you tend to attract a few fans or detractors who respond to every single thing you post. Sometimes those interactions can be obnoxious. Sometimes, they can be so much worse.

Today’s Cyber is about a reply guy from hell, a person who—for almost two decades—has used the internet to wage sustained harassment campaigns against multiple women...

Artificial intelligence. It’s in your headlines and on your social media feed. AIs like Midjourney and DALL-E have filled my Twitter feed with algorithmically generated nightmare images of Tony Soprano as a Roman Emperor and Bigbird participating in the January 6 riots.

At the same time, the press has become enamored with the story of Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer who the company let go after Lemoine insisted the LaMDA chatbot was sentient...

Crypto is the wild west. Decentralized finance is the purview of the rich and the risk-taker. There’s millions to be had, but it’s easy—often too easy—to lose everything. If you read Motherboard you know that big and wild hacks are common. Maiar went offline recently after hackers stole $113 million from it. The Osmosis exchange just lost $5 million to hackers. And those are just the stories Motherboard reported on this week...

The future is here, if you can pay for it. From NFTs, to web3, to virtual worlds, it seems like everyone has a pitch about what the future looks like and how we get there. For those involved, it’s a frenzied world of big money and massive opportunity. From the outside looking in, a lot of it looks like a massive scam.

When I was a kid, the future meant flying cars and virtual worlds of our own creation...

Discord. The popular chat app was once the humble home of gamers who were tired of paying for Ventrilo and Teamspeak servers. Now, it’s so much more. The crypto people have come and it doesn’t look like they’re going anywhere.

From the Bored Ape Yacht Club to the next alt-coin with no backing, any project related to the blockchain probably has a space on Discord...

In 2018, the Camp Fire swept through California. It was the deadliest in the state’s history, destroying more than 18,000 buildings and killing 85 people. The town of Paradise all but burned to the ground at the time. Four years later, Paradise is in the midst of a housing boom. New homes are everywhere as people, some of them who lost their homes in the Camp Fire, return to the region.

There’s no guarantee that another fire won’t sweep through the region...

On May 24, several news outlets reported on the internal workings of a Chinese run Uyghur internment camp in Xinjiang. The reports included detailed blueprints of the camp’s interiors, classified speeches from officials, and the personal information of police officers.

An anonymous source hacked the information and got it out of China and into the hands of journalists. It’s part of a recent trend in resurgent hacktivism...

The atom. For a few brief years in the middle of the 20th century, America and the world was cowed by the awesome possibility and terrifying reality of nuclear energy. Nuclear power had the potential to revolutionize the world but nuclear bombs could destroy it. But still … for a brief moment it seemed like nuclear energy would save the world. Then came Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and The China Syndrome. America fell out of love with nuclear energy.

That might be changing...

The image is now iconic. An arctic wolf fursona in a Starbucks smock. Stance set wide. A sign in his hand held high that reads “UNION YES!”

This was Michael Vestigo dressed in his Fursona as Apollo, a former Starbucks employee in Overland Park, Kansas. Why former? The company fired him for “displaying violent and threatening behavior” after he participated in a walkout of his location as part of a unionization effort...

This bonus episode of Cyber is sponsored by Command Line Heroes. If you like Cyber, you’re going to like Command Line Heroes. It’s an original podcast from Red Hat where listeners hear epic true tales of how developers, programmers, hackers, geeks, and open source rebels are revolutionizing the technology landscape.

It’s an award winning show that’s been running for nine seasons. Every season has a theme and season 9 is all about the dark side of programming...