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PODCAST

Lock and Code

Lock and Code tells the human stories within cybersecurity, privacy, and technology. Rogue robot vacuums, hacked farm tractors, and catastrophic software vulnerabilities—it’s all here.

technology tech news

All Episodes

40:10

Is your phone listening to you? (feat. Lena Cohen)

Lock and Code ·

2025/04/06

It has probably happened to you before.You and a friend aretalking—not texting, not DMing, not FaceTiming—buttalking, physically face-to-face, about, say, an upcoming vacation, a new music festival, or a job offer you just got.And then, that same week, you start noticing some eerily specific ads. There’s the Instagram ad about carry-on luggage, the TikTok ad about earplugs, and the countless ads you encounter simply scrolling through the internet about laptop bags.And so you think, “Is my phone

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50:14

What Google Chrome knows about you, with Carey Parker

Lock and Code ·

2025/03/23

Google Chrome is, by far, the most popular web browser in the world.According to several metrics, Chrome accounts for anywhere between 52% and 66% of the current global market share for web browser use. At that higher estimate, that means that, if the 5.5 billion internet users around the world were to open up a web browser right now, 3.6 billion of them would open up Google Chrome.And because the browser is the most common portal to our daily universe of online activity—searching for answers to

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43:53

How ads weirdly know your screen brightness,...

Lock and Code ·

2025/03/09

Something’s not right in the world of location data.In January, a location data broker named Gravy Analytics was hacked, with the alleged cybercriminal behind the attack posting an enormous amount of data online as proof. Though relatively unknown to most of the public, Gravy Analytics is big in the world of location data collection, and,according to an enforcement action from the US Federal Trade Commission last year, the company claimed to “collect, process, and curate more than 17 billion signals

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28:06

Surveillance pricing is "evil and sinister," explains...

Lock and Code ·

2025/02/23

Insurance pricing in America makes a lot of sense so long as you’re one of the insurance companies. Drivers are charged more for traveling long distances, having low credit, owning a two-seater instead of a four, being on the receiving end of a car crash, and—increasingly—for any number of non-determinative data points that insurance companies use to assume higher risk.It’s a pricing model that most people find distasteful, but it’s also a pricing model that could become the norm if companies across

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38:28

A suicide reveals the lonely side of AI chatbots,...

Lock and Code ·

2025/02/09

In February 2024, a 14-year-old boy from Orlando, Florida, committed suicide after confessing his love to the one figure who absorbed nearly all of his time—an AI chatbot.For months, Sewell Seltzer III had grown attached to an AI chatbot modeled after the famous “Game of Thrones” character Daenerys Targaryen. The Daenerys chatbot was not a licensed product, it had no relation to the franchise’s actors, its writer, or producers, but none of that mattered, as, over time, Seltzer came to entrust

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37:48

Three privacy rules for 2025

Lock and Code ·

2025/01/26

It’s Data Privacy Week right now, and that means, for the most part, that you’re going to see a lot of well-intentioned but clumsy information online about how to protect your data privacy. You’ll see articles about iPhone settings. You’ll hear acronyms for varying state laws. And you’ll probably see ads for a variety of apps, plug-ins, and online tools that can be difficult to navigate.So much of Malwarebytes—from Malwarebytes Labs, to the Lock and Code podcast, to the engineers, lawyers, and staff

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47:06

The new rules for AI and encrypted messaging, with...

Lock and Code ·

2025/01/12

The era of artificial intelligence everything is here, and with it, comeeveryday surprisesinto exactly where the next AI tools might pop up.There are major corporations pushing customer support functions onto AI chatbots, Big Tech platforms offering AI image generation for social media posts, and even Google has defaulted to include AI-powered overviews into everyday searches.The next gold rush, it seems, is in AI, and for a group of technical and legal researchers at New York University and Cornell

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38:38

Is nowhere safe from AI slop?

Lock and Code ·

2024/12/29

You can see it on X. You can see on Instagram. It’s flooding community pages on Facebook and filling up channels on YouTube. It’s called “AI slop” and it’s the fastest, laziest way to drive engagement.Like “click bait” before it (“You won’t believe what happens next,” reads the trickster headline), AI slop can be understood as the latest online tactic in getting eyeballs, clicks, shares, comments, and views. With this go-around, however, the methodology is turbocharged with generative AI tools like

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33:44

A day in the life of a privacy pro, with Ron de Jesus

Lock and Code ·

2024/12/16

Privacy is many things for many people.For the teenager suffering from a bad breakup, privacy is the ability to stop sharing her location and to block her ex on social media. For the political dissident advocating against an oppressive government, privacy is the protection that comes from secure, digital communications. And for the California resident who wants to know exactly how they’re being included in so many targeted ads, privacy is the legal right to ask a marketing firm how they collect

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45:00

These cars want to know about your sex life (re-air)...

Lock and Code ·

2024/12/01

Two weeks ago, the Lock and Code podcastshared three stories about home productsthat requested, collected, or exposed sensitive data online.There were the air fryers that asked users to record audio through their smartphones. There was the smart ring maker that, even with privacy controls put into place, published data about users’ stress levels and heart rates. And there was the smart, AI-assisted vacuum that, through the failings of a group of contractors, allowed an image of a woman on a toilet

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26:59

An air fryer, a ring, and a vacuum get brought into a...

Lock and Code ·

2024/11/18

The month, a consumer rights group out of the UK posed a question to the public that they’d likely never considered: Were their air fryers spying on them?By analyzing the associated Android apps for three separate air fryer models from three different companies, a group of researchers learned that these kitchen devices didn’t just promise to make crispier mozzarella sticks, crunchier chicken wings, and flakier reheated pastries—they also wanted a lot of user data, from precise location to voice

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39:34

Why your vote can’t be “hacked,” with Cait Conley of...

Lock and Code ·

2024/11/03

The US presidential election is upon the American public, and with it come fears of “election interference.”But “election interference” is a broad term. It can mean the now-regular and expected foreign disinformation campaigns that are launched to sow political discord or to erode trust in American democracy. It can include domestic campaigns to disenfranchise voters in battleground states. And it can include the upsetting and increasing threats made to election officials and volunteers across the

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35:07

This industry profits from knowing you have cancer,...

Lock and Code ·

2024/10/21

On the internet, you can be shown an online ad because of your age, your address, your purchase history, your politics, your religion, and even your likelihood of having cancer.This is because of the largely unchecked “data broker” industry.Data brokers are analytics and marketing companies that collect every conceivable data point that exists about you, packaging it all into profiles that other companies use when deciding who should see their advertisements.Have a new mortgage? There are data

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36:28

Exposing the Facebook funeral livestream scam

Lock and Code ·

2024/10/07

Online scammers were seen this August stooping to a new low—abusing local funerals to steal from bereaved family and friends.Cybercrime has never been a job of morals (calling it a “job” is already lending it too much credit), but, for many years, scams wavered between clever and brusque. Take the “Nigerian prince” email scam which has plagued victims for close to two decades. In it, would-be victims would receive a mysterious, unwanted message from alleged royalty, and, in exchange for a little

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34:03

What the arrest of Telegram's CEO means, with Eva...

Lock and Code ·

2024/09/09

On August 24, at an airport just outside of Paris, a man named Pavel Durov was detained for questioning by French investigators. Just days later, the same man was charged in crimes related to the distribution of child pornography and illicit transactions, such as drug trafficking and fraud.Durov is the CEO and founder of the messaging and communications app Telegram. Though Durov holds citizenship in France and the United Arab Emirates—where Telegram is based—he was born and lived for many years in

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48:39

Move over malware: Why one teen is more worried about...

Lock and Code ·

2024/08/26

Every age group uses the internet a little bit differently, and it turns out for at least one Gen Z teen in the Bay Area, the classic approach to cyberecurity—defending against viruses, ransomware, worms, and more—is the least of her concerns. Of far more importance is Artificial Intelligence (AI).Today, the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz revisits a prior episode from 2023 about what teenagers fear the most about going online. The conversation is a strong reminder that when America’s

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40:34

AI girlfriends want to know all about you. So might...

Lock and Code ·

2024/08/12

Somewhere out there is a romantic AI chatbot that wants to know everything about you. But in a revealing overlap, other AI tools—which are developed and popularized by far larger companies in technology—could crave the very same thing.For AI tools of any type, our data is key.In the nearly two years since OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT to the public, the biggest names in technology have raced to compete. Meta announced Llama. Google revealed Gemini. And Microsoft debuted Copilot.All these AI features

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43:13

SIEM is not storage, with Jess Dodson

Lock and Code ·

2024/07/29

In the world of business cybersecurity, the powerful technology known as “Security Information and Event Management” is sometimes thwarted by the most unexpected actors—the very people setting it up.Security Information and Event Management—or SIEM—is a term used to describe data-collecting products that businesses rely on to make sense of everything going on inside their network, in the hopes of catching and stopping cyberattacks. SIEM systems can log events and information across an entire

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36:13

How an AI “artist” stole a woman’s face, with Ali...

Lock and Code ·

2024/07/15

Full-time software engineer and part-time Twitch streamer Ali Diamond is used to seeing herself on screen, probably because she’s the one who turns the camera on.But when Diamond received a Direct Message (DM) on Twitter earlier this year, shelearned that her likeness had been recreatedacross a sample of AI-generated images, entirely without her consent.On the AI art sharing platform Civitai, Diamond discovered that a stranger had created an “AI image model” that was fashioned after her. The model

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151 results

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