Latest Twistedfunk Podcast Episodes
Why Congress's Fears of Russian Space Nukes Is Political Theatre
CYBER - February 16, 2024 18:31 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsCyber is a show covering a diverse range of topics. We’ve covered everything from crypto to AI to online cults. If it touches technology or online culture, we’ll talk about it. That’s how you get an episode like today’s, which is both a deep dive into professional wrestling’s latest scandal and ...
AI Deepfakes Are Everywhere and Congress is Completely Out of Their Depth
CYBER - February 09, 2024 17:38 - 50 minutes ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsAn AI-generated Biden called voters in New Hampshire ahead of the primary and told them to stay home. X locked down the search term “Taylor Swift” after AI-generated nudes of the pop giant flooded the platform. In the wake of both scandals, Congress has struggled with how to fight back against t...
Tech Used to Be Bleeding Edge, Now it’s Just Bleeding
CYBER - February 02, 2024 17:03 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsTen years ago, Big Tech reached a peak. Facebook had wormed its way into the lives of billions of people. The mainstream news covered iPhones releases like they were Taylor Swift concerts. Elon Musk was promising to colonize Mars and fill the streets with self-driving cars. In 2024, the wheels h...
How to Read Leaked Datasets Like a Journalist
CYBER - January 26, 2024 16:35 - 55 minutes ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsWe live in a golden age of data. Every day, hacktivists release terabytes of data on sites like DDoSecrets, but sorting through it all requires some technical knowledge. What if you don’t know XML from SQL let alone how to write a simple Python script? Micah Lee is the director of information s...
What a Novel About an AI Documenting the Last Human Says About Our Real Dystopia
CYBER - January 19, 2024 16:40 - 53 minutes ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsThe unreliable narrator of After World, the new novel from author Debbie Urbanski, is an AI tasked with writing a book about Sen, the last human on Earth. In this world, humanity is done. The world is moving on without us and Sen was born for a purpose: to watch the planet change itself without ...
The Future of Nukes Involves AI and Nobody Knows What Happens Next
CYBER - January 12, 2024 17:13 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsAccording to the hype, artificial intelligence is changing everything. The truth is more complicated, but that doesn’t mean that companies and governments aren’t rushing to embrace the new technology. It’s even being used to update an old and destructive technology: nuclear weapons. America is ...
OpenAI’s Make or Break Lawsuit and the Golden Idol of AGI
CYBER - January 05, 2024 14:30 - 58 minutes ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsThe New York Times kicked off the holiday season by suing OpenAI and Microsoft. The paper of record believes that ChatGPT is violating various copyrights by using its articles as training data. It’s a landmark case that may end up before the Supreme Court and might change copyright law in Americ...
The Great American Train Wreck Isn’t Going Away
CYBER - December 20, 2023 16:12 - 57 minutes ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsOn February 3, a train crashed in East Palestine, Ohio releasing toxic chemicals into the air. Almost a month later, another train owned by the same company also derailed in Ohio. That’s not all. Trains in Charlotte are running slower than they should. NYC can’t fit trains into its new station. ...
The Old Internet Is Dying, and Something Worse Is Being Born
CYBER - December 13, 2023 21:24 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsAs we slide into the winter holidays, Cyber is taking some time to relax with old friends and discuss the things that truly matter: the decline of the internet, creator culture, and the transcendent power of movies. This week on Cyber, Aftermath co-founder Gita Jackson stops by to talk about “...
How Online Fights Affect Real World Battlefields
CYBER - December 01, 2023 17:39 - 51 minutes ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsYour posts matter more than you think. Social media has changed the way wars are fought and the internet has become a new battlefield. Twitter may be dying, but it still matters an awful lot to policy makers. TikTok is ascendent, but often because its content can be repurposed on other platfor...
You Can’t Automate the Difficult Decisions
CYBER - November 27, 2023 05:00 - 19 minutes ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsThe tensions between security and operations and developer teams are the stuff of legend. DevSecOps is trying to change that, and automation is a big part of making it possible. But automation alone can’t overcome entrenched behavior. Joylynn Kirui shares how Microsoft is helping teams prioritiz...
Despite OpenAI Chaos, Wall Street Is Still Betting Big on AI
CYBER - November 22, 2023 21:17 - 54 minutes ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsWhat happens when a for profit company is run by a non-profit board of directors who are ideologically opposed to the company’s product? You get something like what happened to OpenAI over the past week, which saw its board of directors sack CEO Sam Altman before eventually reinstating him and r...
What Happens When an Anti-Sex Trafficking Operation Goes Wrong
CYBER - November 20, 2023 21:08 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsWhen “Alison” started working for Operation Underground Railroad, she wanted to make a difference in the lives of kids. She was a former Marine and social worker who’d seen the devastating effects that abuse could have on people. She wanted to stop it before it happened. She ended up with a bro...
Crypto One Year After the Collapse: All My Apes Blinded
CYBER - November 10, 2023 18:53 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsIt’s a bad time to be a crypto-person. Some of crypto’s biggest evangelists are facing serious federal jail time. FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted on seven counts of wire fraud, securities fraud, and money laundering after a disastrous trial. Some owners of Bored Ape NFTs experienced ...
The Landlord Tech Company That Turned Security Deposits Into a Monthly Fee
CYBER - October 31, 2023 13:12 - 52 minutes ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsRhino sounds like a good deal at first. When people move into a new apartment, they often have to pay a large lump sum security deposit to their landlord. For people who can’t pay, Rhino offers to bill them a little bit every month in lieu of the deposit. But there’s a catch: unlike security dep...
The Viral ‘Kia Boys’ Car Theft Trend That’s Going Viral on Instagram
CYBER - October 20, 2023 20:03 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsKias and Hyundais are being stolen in America at an alarming rate. Using a screwdriver and a USB cable, it’s trivially easy to steal one. Kia and Hyundai blame social media, but the problem is so overwhelming that several cities are suing the car manufacturer for creating a crime epidemic by ele...
Space Junk, Nuclear Waste, AI Nukes and the Reason We’re All Still Here
CYBER - October 10, 2023 20:49 - 56 minutes ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsThere’s a lot of reasons to be worried about the future. Climate change, nuclear weapons, space junk, and World War III are all threats both present and long-term. But, every day, people are trying to make the world a better place. It lands them in weird situations like skinny dripping with Sovi...
Cory Doctorow on Why the Internet Broke and How to Fix It
CYBER - October 04, 2023 20:22 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsHave you noticed your internet is …. kinda shitty? Does Spotfiy’s smart shuffle keep playing the same Cure song over and over again? Does a quick google search give you page after page of obvious advertisements? Want to leave Facebook behind but that one group chat keeps you checking in day afte...
You Can't Automate Buy-In
CYBER - October 02, 2023 07:50 - 18 minutes ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsPutting new technology to use is an exciting prospect. But going from purchase to production isn’t always smooth—even when it’s something everyone is looking forward to. Code Comments covers the bumps, the hiccups, and the setbacks teams face when adjusting to new technology—and the triumphs the...
The Real History of the Luddites
CYBER - September 29, 2023 19:28 - 47 minutes ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsLuddites! It’s a dirty word, right? One that’s become synonymous with anti-technology crusaders that want to return us to an idyllic past where everyone is free from their phones. But who were the Luddites? Where does the term come from? How has it been misused and do we, perhaps, need a little ...
Operation Underground Railroad, Psychic Intelligence, and ‘The Sound of Freedom’
CYBER - September 25, 2023 21:13 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsThis summer, a movie called The Sound of Freedom took America by storm. The hero was Tim Ballard, the founder of an organization called Operation Underground Railroad. The movie depicted Ballard as an avenging hero who rescued trafficked children from a life of slavery. The truth, we’re all find...
‘Extremely Online’ With Taylor Lorenz
CYBER - September 15, 2023 20:10 - 2 hours ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsIt’s time for a new history of the internet, one that focuses on the recent revolutions that define the world we all live in. Social media has changed the way many of us live and work. It’s a world defined by a new economy of creators and influencers. The new media is here and it’s Extremely Onl...
Hot Labor Summer
CYBER - September 05, 2023 19:58 - 43 minutes ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsThe heat is still here, but the summer will soon be over. Here at the precipice of fall I wanted to take a moment to reflect on one of the big stories that Motherboard covered this season: labor, strikes, and unions. Here to tell us all about it is Motherboard labor reporter Jules Roscoe. Stor...
The Jason Koebler Exit Interview, Part Two
CYBER - August 25, 2023 05:25 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsIt’s part two of our bittersweet episode of Cyber where we bid farewell to Motherboard editor-in-chief Jason Koebler. This week we do a deep dive into the Motherboard lore. The stories that broke us, the controversies that made us who we are. Come find out which popular web comic wrote a strip a...
Rare Motherboard Lore and a Goodbye to Jason Koebler
CYBER - August 18, 2023 19:58 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsIt’s a bittersweet episode of Cyber as we bid farewell to Motherboard editor-in-chief Jason Koebler. It’s a long episode so we’ve split it into two parts. This week you get some discussions about the topics of the day including Planet of Bass, Oliver Anthony, and the vibes-based economy. After t...
The Viral Science Video That Will Save the World or Do Nothing At All
CYBER - August 04, 2023 19:17 - 56 minutes ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsRoom-temperature superconductors are here! Maybe! Look, science is a liar sometimes, especially in the internet age. Motherboard science reporter Becky Ferreira is here to help us parse the truth from fiction of LK-99. It’s either one of the biggest science stories of our entire lives or … just ...
The Barbenheimer Special
CYBER - July 28, 2023 19:08 - 2 hours ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsWe’ve got a super sized Cyber for you today that’s all about the two hottest movies in theaters. One is a mythological take on the creation of the modern world and the devastating weapons that ushered it in. The other is about an idol forged from plastic that came to dominate that world. That’s...
Adam Conover On the Hollywood Strike
CYBER - July 24, 2023 15:38 - 43 minutes ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsIt’s a brutally hot summer, a great time to cool off in an air conditioned movie theater or to catch up on some of those TV shows you’ve had on your list forever. But did you know the people who make the fine entertainment you know and love are on strike? Both writers and actors are picketing, ...
The False Claims Behind an Anti-Trafficking Group’s Hollywood Moment
CYBER - July 14, 2023 19:12 - 46 minutes ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsA movie about a Mormon anti-trafficking activist made headlines when it beat Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny at the box office. But Sound of Freedom’s box office numbers aren’t all they’re cracked up to be and the group behind the movie, Operation Underground Railroad (OUR) has a long and ...
Celebrating the End of the Usable Internet
CYBER - July 07, 2023 18:52 - 40 minutes ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsIt feels like the old internet is breaking apart and no one is sure where to go. The first three pages of search results on Google are dreck. Reddit is shutting down the third party apps that make it usable. AI generated content is flooding beloved old websites. This might just be the end of th...
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