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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

50:13

What's there to save about social media? (feat. Rabble)

Lock and Code ·

2025/10/05

“Connection” was the promise—and goal—of much of the early internet. No longer would people be separated from vital resources and news that was either too hard to reach or made simply inaccessible by governments. No longer would education be guarded behind walls both physical and paid. And no longer would your birthplace determine so much about the path of your life, as the internet could connect people to places, ideas, businesses, collaborations, and agency.Somewhere along the line though,

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52:41

Can you disappear online? (feat. Peter Dolanjski)

Lock and Code ·

2025/09/21

There’s more about you online than you know.The company Acxiom, for example, has probably determined whether you’re a heavy drinker, or if you’re overweight, or if you smoke (or all three). The same company has also probably estimated—to the exact dollar—the amount you spend every year on dining out, donating to charities, and traveling domestically. Another company Experian, has probably made a series of decisions about whether you are “Likely,” “Unlikely,” “Highly Likely,” etc., to shop at a

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48:28

This “insidious” police tech claims to predict crime...

Lock and Code ·

2025/09/07

In the late 2010s, a group of sheriffs out of Pasco County, Florida, believed they could predict crime. The Sheriff’s Department there had piloted a program called “Intelligence-Led Policing” and the program would allegedly analyze disparate points of data to identify would-be criminals.But in reality, the program didn’t so much predict crime, as it did make criminals out of everyday people, including children.High schoolers’ grades were fed into the Florida program, along with their attendance

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37:13

How a scam hunter got scammed (feat. Julie-Anne Kearns)

Lock and Code ·

2025/08/24

If there’s one thing that scam hunter Julie-Anne Kearns wants everyone to know, it is that no one is immune from a scam. And she would know—she fell for one last year.For years now, Kearns has made a name for herself on TikTok as a scam awareness and education expert. Popular under the name@staysafewithmjules, Kearns makes videos about scam identification and defense. She has posted countless profile pictures that are used and repeated by online scammers across different accounts. She has flagged

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40:31

“The worst thing” for online rights: An...

Lock and Code ·

2025/08/10

The internet is cracking apart. It’s exactly what some politicians want.In June, a Texas law that requires age verification on certain websites withstood a legal challenge brought all the way to the US Supreme Court. It could be a blueprint for how the internet will change very soon.The law,titled HB 1181and passed in 2023, places new requirements on websites that portray or depict “sexual material harmful to minors.” With the law, the owners or operators of websites that contain images or videos or

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52:02

How the FBI got everything it wanted (re-air, feat....

Lock and Code ·

2025/07/27

For decades, digital rights activists, technologists, and cybersecurity experts have worried about what would happen if the US government secretly broke into people’s encrypted communications.The weird thing, though, is that it's already happened—sort of.US intelligence agencies, including the FBI and NSA, have long sought what is called a “backdoor” into the secure and private messages that are traded through platforms like WhatsApp, Signal, and Apple’s Messages. These applications all provide what

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45:29

Is AI "healthy" to use?

Lock and Code ·

2025/07/13

“Health” isn’t the first feature that most anyone thinks about when trying out a new technology, but a recent spate of news is forcing the issue when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI).In June,The New York Times reportedon a group of ChatGPT users who believed the AI-powered chat tool and generative large language model held secretive, even arcane information. It told one mother that she could use ChatGPT to commune with “the guardians,” and it told another man that the world around him was

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45:26

Corpse-eating selfies, and other ways to trick...

Lock and Code ·

2025/06/29

There’s a unique counter response to romance scammers.Her name is Becky Holmes.Holmes, an expert and author on romance scams, has spent years responding to nearly every romance scammer who lands a message in her inbox. She told one scammer pretending to be Brad Pitt that she needed immediate helphiding the body of one of her murder victims. She made one romance scammer laugh at her immediate willingness to take an international flight to see him. She has told scammers she lives at addresses withlewd

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46:15

The data on denying social media for kids (feat. Dr....

Lock and Code ·

2025/06/15

Complex problems often assume complex solutions, but recent observations about increased levels of anxiety and depression, increased reports of loneliness, and lower rates of in-person friendships for teens and children in America today have led some school districts across the country to take direct and simple action: Take away the access to smartphones in schools.Not everyone is convinced. When social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt proposed five solutions to what he called an "epidemic of

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31:33

What does Facebook know about me?

Lock and Code ·

2025/06/01

There’s an easy way to find out what Facebook knows about you—you just have to ask.In 2020, the social media giant launched an online portal that allows all users to access their historical data and to request specific types of information for download across custom time frames. Want to know how many posts you’ve made, ever? You can find that. What about every photo you’ve uploaded? You can find that, too. Or what about every video you’ve watched, every “recognized” device you’ve used to log in,

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26:11

How Los Angeles banned smartphones in schools (feat....

Lock and Code ·

2025/05/18

There’s a problem in class today, and the second largest school district in the United States is trying to solve it.After looking at the growing body of research that has associated increased smartphone and social media usage with increased levels of anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, and isolation—especially amongst adolescents and teenagers—Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) implemented a cellphone ban across its 1,000 schools for its more than 500,000 students.Under the ban,

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46:12

The AI chatbot cop squad is here (feat. Emanuel...

Lock and Code ·

2025/05/04

“Heidi” is a 36-year-old, San Francisco-born, divorced activist who is lonely, outspoken, and active on social media. “Jason” is a shy, bilingual teenager whose parents immigrated from Ecuador who likes anime, gaming, comic books, and hiking.Neither of them is real. Both are supposed to fight crime.Heidi and Jason are examples of “AI personas” that are being pitched by the company Massive Blue for its lead product, Overwatch. Already in use at police departments across the United States, Overwatch

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36:30

Did DOGE "breach" Americans' data? (feat. Sydney...

Lock and Code ·

2025/04/20

If you don’t know about the newly created US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), there’s a strong chance they already know about you.Created on January 20 by US President Donald Trump throughExecutive Order, DOGE’s broad mandate is “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”To fulfill its mission, though, DOGE has taken great interest in Americans’ data.On February 1, DOGE team members without the necessary security clearancesaccessed

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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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144 results

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