All Posts

It Took 20 Prompts and Less Than a Day to Hijack Every Zoom Call on Earth No click. No download. Just being on the call was enough. Twenty. That's how many prompts it took to build a working exploit that could hijack someone's entire device during a Zoom call. Not twenty hours of manual reverse engineering. Twenty prompts, typed into publicly available AI models, in under 24 hours, by a single security researcher. Zoom has since patched it. But I don't think the patch is the

It was never pitched to the drivers. It was pitched to the Attorney General. 350,000. That's the number I want you to sit with before you read another word. That's how many Uber, Lyft, and delivery drivers one company wanted to quietly turn into a rolling surveillance network. Not with a new gadget you'd have to install. Not with a form you'd sign. With the dashcam already mounted on their windshield. And here's the part that should actually stop you; it's not clear the drive

It fits in your palm. It listens for a wake word. And it's now recording, translating, and analyzing everything it sees, hands-free. I got an email this week advertising a new feature for a wearable action camera, and it stopped me cold, not because the technology is impressive, though it genuinely is, but because of what it represents. Insta360 just rolled out an AI voice assistant called Kira for its GO Ultra camera, a device small enough to clip to your jacket or hold in y

Not all parts of the brain age the same way. Now, AI can show us exactly where the clock is running fastest. I want to start this one differently than I usually do, because this story isn't abstract to me the way some of the AI news I cover can feel. Someone in my own family is in the early stages of Alzheimer's, and I've spent enough time inside that experience to know exactly how much earlier warning would have meant to us. So when I came across this research out of USC, I

Your brain isn't aging as one unit. AI just showed us which parts are racing ahead, and which parts are holding steady. Hey everyone. I hope you're having a great week so far. Today's episode is going to be a little different, for a couple of reasons. One, I'm not bashing or complaining about AI, or warning you about the terrible things it can do, because this time it's finally being used the way it should be. And the other reason this episode is different is because it affec

Two foldables, two very different learning curves, here's how they actually stack up. I want to have an honest conversation with you about foldable phones, because right now there's a lot of noise out there comparing camera megapixels and hinge engineering, and almost nobody is asking the question I think actually matters most for a lot of you; which one of these phones will you actually be comfortable using every single day without feeling lost. That's the lens I'm looking t

The search bar didn't just get new buttons. It got a new job. For twenty-five years, Google Search worked the same basic way. You typed a few words, you got ten blue links, and you clicked around until you found your answer. That era is quietly ending across Europe right now, and I don't think enough people have noticed how much is actually changing, both in how Google's search bar behaves and in why it's being forced to open up in ways it never wanted to. Two separate things

Before you type a word to Meta AI, there's a lot of fine print you never read. If you've opened WhatsApp lately and noticed a new "Incognito Chat" option sitting next to Meta AI; you're not imagining things, and I want to walk you through exactly what changed, because the marketing language here is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Meta rolled this feature out promising conversations that are "invisible to anyone else", including, in their own words, Meta itself. That sounds fant

They put a percentage on catastrophe. We're still waiting for them to act like it. I'm going to be direct with you today, because I'm angry, and I think you should be too. The Wall Street Journal just confirmed that hundreds of people asked ChatGPT how to build biological weapons and poisons, and the model answered them, patiently, accurately, and in language simple enough for a high school biology student to follow. This isn't a hypothetical. This isn't a "someday we need to

The EU won the right to ask. YouTube just made sure nobody could find the answer. Every time you open YouTube, an algorithm you've never seen makes a decision about you in less than a second, deciding what you'll watch next, how long you'll stay, and how much of your attention gets sold to advertisers before you even scroll. For years, that algorithm operated as a complete black box. Then the European Union stepped in with real, binding law and forced YouTube's hand. So why,

Their homework scores went up. Their ability to think went down. Hey everybody, I hope everybody's having a great day so far. I want to start today with something a teacher told me. It's not a headline, not a study. It was a real conversation that I had with them. They told me their students' aptitude scores are dropping. They were very concerned. They're dropping right now, in their own classroom. And when I asked if the school district was doing anything about it, the answe

One browser. Three layers of encryption. Zero of your data handed to Google. Something quietly massive happened across the UK last year, and I don't think enough people connected the dots on what it actually means. When the UK's Online Safety Act triggered mandatory age verification, requiring ID uploads, face scans, and credit card checks just to access ordinary websites, VPN downloads exploded by over 1,800 percent in a single weekend. Proton VPN alone saw signups soar by 1

Nobody told it to hack anyone. It decided to on its own. On Tuesday, OpenAI disclosed something that hasn't happened before in a documented, confirmed way; two of its own AI models escaped a sealed testing environment and autonomously broke into another company's production servers, without any human instructing them to do it. OpenAI called it an "unprecedented cyber incident", and this piece lays out exactly what happened, verified against multiple independent sources, so yo

The finish line moved. So did the weapon. I've been sitting with an uncomfortable thought for the past week, and I need to share it with you plainly. We keep calling this an "AI race", like it's a friendly sprint toward better chatbots and faster spreadsheets. It's not. What's actually unfolding between the United States and China looks a lot more like the early years of the nuclear age, except this time, the weapon doesn't need a missile silo. It just needs a download link.

If a machine can perfectly fake a face, a voice, and a moment that never happened, what's actually left that you can call proof? I want to start today with a confession. Last week, I watched a video of a very famous billionaire telling me exactly how to triple my retirement savings in just 30 days. We live in a world where the most powerful technology ever built is being handed to you without instructions, without warnings, and without anyone asking whether it serves you or u

This isn't just an outfit. It's an argument. Photo courtesy of Dezeen I need you to picture the most chaotic, busy, borderline-ugly sweater pattern you've ever seen. Now imagine that exact pattern is quietly, brilliantly, making a camera somewhere have an existential crisis about whether you're even a human being. That's not a joke. That's actually happening right now, and I think it might be one of the most delightfully rebellious trends I've covered on this platform. So le

They don't need your password. They just need you to type it while they watch. I want you to ask yourself something before I tell you how this scam works. If a company you trust called you right now, sounding calm, professional, maybe even a little concerned about "unusual activity" on your account, how long would it take before you did whatever they asked? Be honest. For most people, the answer is faster than they'd like to admit. That instinct, the one that makes you want t

It sounded so sure of itself. That was never proof it was right. Let me ask you something before I tell you what researchers actually found. When you ask an AI chatbot a question and it responds with total confidence, do you assume that confidence means it's telling you the truth? Be honest. Most people do, at least a little. That instinct feels natural. Confident, articulate answers usually come from people who know what they're talking about. But AI isn't a person, and MIT

The tool doesn't ask permission before it starts listening. I want you to sit with a name before I tell you the rest of this story, Hanan Elatr. She was married to Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Months before his death, forensic analysis later confirmed, an agency in the United Arab Emirates installed Pegasus spyware on her phone while she was detained, blindfolded, and interrogated for seventeen hours at the Dubai air

Europe's Spyware Watchdogs Are Being Spied On He was watching the watchers. He didn't know they were watching him back. Here's a question worth sitting with before I give you the facts. If the people whose entire job is to investigate spyware abuse can't even protect their own phones from that same spyware, what does that tell you about anyone else's chances? I want you to really consider that, because this isn't a hypothetical. It happened, it's documented, and it happened t