Podcast Episodes

Solving the password’s hardest problem with passkeys, featuring Anna Pobletts

Season 4 Episode 7

How many passwords do you have? If you're at all like our Lock and Code host David Ruiz, that number hovers around 200. But the important follow up question is: How many of those passwords can you ac…

Published on 2 years, 8 months ago

"Brad Pitt," a still body, ketchup, and a knife, or the best trick ever played on a romance scammer, with Becky Holmes

Season 4 Episode 6

Becky Holmes knows how to throw a romance scammer off script—simply bring up cannibalism. 

In January, Holmes shared on Twitter that an account with the name "Thomas Smith" had started up a random cha…

Published on 2 years, 9 months ago

Fighting censorship online, or, encryption’s latest surprise use-case, with Mallory Knodel

Season 4 Episode 5

Government threats to end-to-end encryption—the technology that secures your messages and shared photos and videos—have been around for decades, but the most recent threats to this technology are uni…

Published on 2 years, 9 months ago

What is AI ”good” at (and what the heck is it, actually), with Josh Saxe

Season 4 Episode 4

In November of last year, the AI research and development lab OpenAI revealed its latest, most advanced language project: A tool called ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is so much more than "just" a chatbot. As users…

Published on 2 years, 10 months ago

A private moment, caught by a Roomba, ended up on Facebook. Eileen Guo explains how

Season 4 Episode 3

In 2020, a photo of a woman sitting on a toilet—her shorts pulled half-way down her thighs—was shared on Facebook, and it was shared by someone whose job it was to look at that photo and, by labeling…

Published on 2 years, 10 months ago

Fighting tech’s gender gap with TracketPacer

Season 4 Episode 2

Last month, the TikTok user TracketPacer posted a video online called “Network Engineering Facts to Impress No One at Zero Parties.”  TracketPacer regularly posts fun, educational content about how t…

Published on 2 years, 11 months ago

Why does technology no longer excite?

Season 4 Episode 1

When did technology last excite you? 

If Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is to be believed, your own excitement ended, simply had to end, after turning 35 years old. De…

Published on 2 years, 11 months ago

Chasing cryptocurrency through cyberspace, with Brian Carter

Episode 26

On June 7, 2021, the US Department of Justice announced a breakthrough: Less than one month after the oil and gas pipeline company Colonial Pipeline had paid its ransomware attackers roughly $4.4 mil…

Published on 2 years, 11 months ago

Security advisories are falling short. Here’s why, with Dustin Childs

Season 3 Episode 25

Decades ago, patching was, to lean into a corny joke, a bit patchy. 

In the late 90s, the Microsoft operating system (OS) Windows 98 had a supportive piece of software that would find security patche…

Published on 3 years ago

Threat hunting: How MDR secures your business

Season 3 Episode 24

A cyberattack is not the same thing as malware—in fact, malware itself is typically the last stage of an attack, the punctuation mark that closes out months of work from cybercriminals who have infil…

Published on 3 years ago