CYBER

CYBER is an interview show about hacking, leaks, and AI, and about the institutions struggling to keep up with them. Its conversations run from the forensic to the literary. At the forensic end is Micah Lee, director of information security at The Intercept, in an episode titled 'How to Read Leaked Datasets Like a Journalist'. He recounts a hacker reaching him on Signal and sending a file of about a hundred megabytes that expanded into a mass of patient and prescription records tied to America's Frontline Doctors. He did not know whether any of it was real. He describes how he went about authenticating it, and says the research led to a congressional investigation. Near the close, the talk turns to practical advice: leave as little trail as possible, or mix it in with thousands of other people's. Ed Zitron brings a different complaint. He runs a PR firm, writes a newsletter, and faults a lot of tech coverage, podcasts especially, for lacking an informed perspective. He reads a run of acquisitions from his newsletter, Oculus to Meta, WhatsApp to the company then called Facebook, Mojang to Microsoft, and argues each iPhone generation now opens a smaller gap over the last. The NSA's Prism program comes up too. AI threads through several episodes. In 'AI Deepfakes Are Everywhere and Congress is Completely Out of Their Depth', one speaker calls a piece of likeness legislation ridiculous, arguing it would leave the artists it aims to protect open to AI exploitation by whoever acquires the rights to their bodies. The conversation also stresses that the law offers a right to sue, not a takedown of AI-generated sexual imagery. Matthew adds a note at the top: hours after recording, the Federal Communications Commission declared AI-generated voices in robocalls illegal, relying on the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act rather than any new law. The literary end belongs to Debbie Urbanski, whose first novel, Afterworld, is narrated by an AI called Story Worker that is trained on 21st-century novels and tasked with telling the story of the last human on Earth. Spoilers are deliberately held back for the second half of that conversation. Then there is wrestling. One episode explains why younger wrestlers call older ones carnies, a word rooted in the business's carnival days, and traces McMahon's shift from buffoonish announcer to villainous owner set against heroes like The Rock and Steve Austin, alongside rumors of a casting couch in WWE. That episode, 'Why Congress's Fears of Russian Space Nukes Is Political Theatre', starts with an advisory from Emily about sexual violence and suicide and a timestamp for skipping ahead to the discussion of nukes in space. What a listener takes away is breadth anchored in specifics: how a leak gets checked, what a likeness law actually grants, and how an old statute catches a new scam.