Elon Musk’s attempts to buy Twitter have sent ripples through the social media platform. There is a story here about panic, the limited reach of social media, and the increasingly fuzzy nature of the private/ public space … but I think all that is a surface level analysis. For me, the more interesting story is the corporate what lies just underneath.You see, Musk is the richest man not because he invented anything wonderful and world changing. No, he’s rich because he’s good at making money. He’s a businessman first and foremost. Through that lens, the story of the Twitter acquisition becomes one of shitposts and SEC filings, a bizarre fight between tech titans, a rehashing of old corporate techniques like “poison pills” and “hostile takeovers.”On this episode of Cyber, we sit down with Motherboard features writer and editor Maxwell Strachan. He’s here to answer all your burning questions about Musk’s attempted Twitter takeover.Stories discussed in this episode:Twitter Loses Elon Musk the Board Member, Regains Elon Musk the ShitposterTwitter and Elon Musk Are Now at WarWe Spoke to an Old-School Corporate Raider About Elon Musk and TwitterWe’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Drones are here to stay. The U.S. Military may have pioneered the art of using drones in a war zone, but America’s cops are pushing the tech on the homefront. From the Boston Dynamics dogs taking temperatures in Hawaii to quadcopters patrolling the skies, the cops are very interested in drone tech.One of the big companies in the field is Skydio. It advertises itself directly to police officers and has cultivated relationships with departments across the country. This week on Cyber, host Matthew Gault and Motherboard Editor-in-Chief Jason Koebler discuss the close relationship between Skydio and America’s police.Stories discussed in this episode:When Police Do Marketing for Surveillance Tech CompaniesWorld’s Richest Man Gets What He Wanted (Elon Musk Becomes King Shit of Turd Mountain)Everything You Need to Know About Ring, Amazon’s Surveillance Camera CompanyWe’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Are you using two-factor authentication for all your accounts? Do you have Apple Pay or another service hooked up to a bank card? Well, so do criminals. It’s the growth of a scheme Cyber first reported on about six months ago. Thanks to bots that help criminals trick you into giving up your 2FA codes, they're now able to set up links between Apple Pay bank cards. It’s shockingly easy to do and, bizarrely, shockingly hard to stop.On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard Staff Writer Joseph Cox walks us through how criminals are circumventing 2FA and using Apple Pay to go on spending sprees.Stories discussed in this episode:Criminals Abuse Apple Pay in Spending SpreesThe Booming Underground Market for Bots That Steal Your 2FA CodesWe’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Trains, trains, trains. You might not think of them very often but they make America run. Getting stuff from point A to Point B is more than a full time job. Our world runs on logistical supply chains that are supported, in large part, by freight trains.But what happens if the people doing those jobs don’t get much sleep? What happens when the company running the trains implements systems that deprive its already weary workforce of much needed Zs? This week on Cyber, Motherboard Senior Staff Writer Aaron Gordon is here to answer all those questions. Stories discussed in this episode:‘The Worst and Most Egregious Attendance Policy’ Is Pushing Railroad Workers to the BrinkAmtrak Is Streaming an Empty Railroad on Twitch to Beef With Freight Rail Companies‘What Choice Do I Have?’ Freight Train Conductors Are Forced to Work Tired, Sick, and StressedWe’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Every week we publish multiple incredible stories on Motherboard. This week there were so many that we couldn’t decide which one we wanted to focus on. So. We’re gonna do something a little different for this episode.That’s right, we’re going full Cipher. If you’re familiar with the show, Cipher is that infrequent segment we do where we decipher the week’s biggest tech stories. On this episode of Cyber we answer the questions: Is it illegal to run a private Club Penguin server? How is T-Mobile dealing with hackers? And why can’t I get on to the Raid Forums and what happens if you make an illegal trip to North Korea to spread the gospel of the Blockchain.Here to help sort through these headlines is the man who wrote many of them: Motherboard Staff Writer Joseph Cox.Stories discussed in this episode:Cops Arrest 3 People for Running ‘Club Penguin Rewritten’ Beloved by MillionsLaw Enforcement Seizes RaidForums, One of the Most Important Hacking SitesT-Mobile Secretly Bought Its Customer Data from Hackers to Stop Leak. It Failed.US Extradites Man Who Allegedly Sold Backdoored Phones for the FBIEthereum Programmer Jailed for North Korea Trip Wanted to Clone Dogs, Become ‘Crypto Hero’We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Police records reviewed by Motherboard show that, as security experts immediately predicted when the product launched, this technology has been used as a tool to stalk and harass women.Of the 150 total police reports mentioning AirTags, in 50 cases women called the police because they started getting notifications that their whereabouts were being tracked by an AirTag they didn’t own. Of those, 25 could identify a man in their lives—ex-partners, husbands, bosses—who they strongly suspected planted the AirTags on their cars in order to follow and harass them. Those women reported that current and former intimate partners—the most likely people to harm women overall—are using AirTags to stalk and harass them. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Close your eyes. Imagine it's 2010. You’ve just learned about something called Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency. You spend $50 and get 50 of the coins, thinking the whole thing is funny. Cut to 2022. What you spent around 50 bucks on in 2010 is now worth 2 million dollars.There’s just one problem. You need a password to access that 2 million and 2010 was a long time ago. It’s a problem plaguing the world of cryptocurrency: an epidemic of millionaires unable to access their cash. But there are options.To deal with the problem, a cottage industry of asset recovery specialists has emerged. One is Crypto Asset Recovery, a startup run by a father-son team in New Hampshire.They are Chris and Charlie Brooks and they are here with me today to talk about the business of breaking in.Chris and Charlie also appeared on an episode of Motherboard’s TV show Cryptoland, which you can stream at YouTube.com/motherboard.We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week.  Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For many, playing video games for a living is a dream come true. Whether you’re streaming on Twitch or doing speedruns for charity, there are viable ways to earn a living playing video games. But get NFTs and the blockchain in the mix and, well, you’ve got a whole different system.Today we’re gonna talk about Axie Infinity, the most popular of the so-called ‘play-to-earn’ games. The promise of Axie and others is that you can earn money simply by playing the game. But how much? Is Axie fun? How easy is it to cash out? And wait … this game has bosses and managers? What the hell is going on?This week on Cyber, Motherboard Staff Writer Edward Ongweso Jr. is here to help us untangle this hellishly complicated nightmare of “play-to-earn” gaming. His latest on the site is “The Metaverse Has Bosses Too. Meet the ‘Managers’ of Axie Infinity.”We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week.  Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We’ve got a special presentation on the show for you today, an interview with Yuliana Shemetovets, the spokesperson for a group of ethical hackers going to war with Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. They’re called the Cyber Partisans and they’re responsible for hacks against the Lukashenko regime.Lukashenko is a die-hard Putin ally who has been in charge of Belarus since 1994. In that time, the country has become more unstable. Protestors have disappeared from the streets and Belarus has allowed Russian troops to move through the country to strike at Ukraine.The Cyber Partisans have worked behind the scenes to disrupt Lukashenko’s regime. They’ve hacked the Belarusian railway system, which still runs on Windows XP, and obtained phone calls between government officials.You’ll hear a little untranslated Belarussian in this episode. I only want to highlight one bit that I think is important. When Shemetovets is talking about acquiring phone calls, we’ll play the raw audio of Belarussian government officials talking. What you’re hearing is someone bragging about beating up a protestor.“I open the…car door, and pull this [woman] by her hair. I kicked her, and told the riot police to..and that bitch started screaming.”The translated audio has quite a few more explivites in it.This is an on-camera interview that first aired on VICE News as an episode of SuperUsers. It was produced by Louise McLoughlin and Cal Bateman.We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live on Wednesdays at 4pm EST. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There are thousands of people still trapped in Ukraine and trying to flee. Millions are internally displaced and many are crossing the Polish border and finding refuge. But, for foreign students stuck in Ukraine, it can be much much more difficult to leave. A war zone is a terrible place to be no matter who you are, but these foreign students are facing unprecedented challenges. Thankfully, there are people trying to help.That’s the subject of the Motherboard story “Inside the OSINT Operation to Get Foreign Students Out of Ukraine.” It was written by Sebastian Skov Andersen and Gabriel Geiger. One of the OSINT organizers is Chris Kubecka. On Cyber this week, all three are here to discuss the operation and the ongoing struggles of foreign nationals trying to flee a war zone.We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live on Wednesdays at 4pm EST. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.Subscribe to CYBER on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.