Lock and Code

• How Los Angeles banned smartphones in schools (feat. Nick Melvoin)

  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, students who are kindergartners all the way through high school seniors cannot use cellphones, smartphones, smart watches, earbuds, smart glasses, and any other electronic devices that can send messages, receive calls, or browse the internet. Phones are not allowed at lunch or during passing periods between classes, and, under the ban, individual schools decide how students’ phones are stored, be that in lockers, in magnetically sealed pouches, or just placed into sleeves at the front door of every classroom, away from students’ reach.The ban was approved by the Los Angeles Unified School District through what is called a “resolution”—which the board voted on last year. LAUSD Board Member Nick Melvoin, who sponsored the resolution, said the overall ban was the right decision to help students. “The research is clear: widespread use of smartphones and social media by kids and adolescents is harmful to their mental health, distracts from learning, and stifles meaningful in-person interaction.”Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with LAUSD Board Member Nick Melvoin about the smartphone ban, how exceptions were determined, where opposition arose, and whether it is “working.” Melvoin also speaks about the biggest changes he has seen in the first few months of the cellphone ban, especially the simple reintroduction of noise in hallways.“[During a school visit last year,] every single kid was on their phone, every single kid. They were standing there looking, texting again, sometimes texting someone who was within a few feet of them, and it was quiet.”Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.

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• The AI chatbot cop squad is here (feat. Emanuel Maiberg and Jason Koebler)

  “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 can allegedly help with the identification, investigation, and arrest of criminal suspects.Understanding exactly how the technology works, however, is difficult—both Massive Blue and the police departments that have paid Massive Blue have remained rather secretive about Overwatch’s inner workings. But, according to an investigation last month by 404 Media, Overwatch is a mix of a few currently available technologies packaged into one software suite. Overwatch can scan social media sites for alleged criminal activity, and it can deploy “AI personas”—which have their own social media accounts and AI-generated profile pictures—to gather intelligence by chatting online with suspected criminals.According to an Overwatch marketing deck obtained by 404 Media, the software’s AI personas are “highly customizable and immediately deployable across all digital channels” and can take on the personalities of escorts, money launderers, sextortionists, and college protesters (who, in real life, engage in activity protected by the First Amendment).Despite the variety of applications, 404 Media revealed that Overwatch has sparked interest from police departments investigating immigration and human trafficking. But the success rate, so far, is non-existent: Overwatch has reportedly not been used in the arrest of a single criminal suspect.Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with 404 Media journalists and co-founders Emanuel Maiberg and Jason Koebler about Overwatch’s capabilities, why police departments are attracted to the technology, and why the murkiness around human trafficking may actually invite unproven solutions like AI chatbots.”Nobody is going to buy that—that if you throw an AI chatbot into the mix, that’s somehow going to reduce gun crime in Americ,” Maiberg said. “But if you apply it to human trafficking, maybe somebody is willing to entertain that because, well, what is the actual problem with human trafficking? Where is it actually happening? Who is getting hurt by it? Who is actually committing it?”He continued:“Maybe there you’re willing to entertain a high tech science fiction solution.”Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk...

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

  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 through Executive 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 clearances accessed classified information belonging to the US Agency for International Development. On February 17, multiple outlets reported that DOGE sought access to IRS data that includes names, addresses, social security numbers, income, net worth, bank information for direct deposits, and bankruptcy history. The next day, the commissioner of the Social Security Administration stepped down after DOGE requested access to information stored there, too, which includes records of lifetime wages and earnings, social security and bank account numbers, the type and amount of benefits individuals received, citizenship status, and disability and medical information. And last month, one US resident filed a data breach notification report with his state’s Attorney General alleging that his data was breached by DOGE and the man behind it, Elon Musk.In speaking with the news outlet Data Breaches Dot Net, the man, Kevin Couture, said:“I filed the report with my state Attorney General against Elon Musk stating my privacy rights were violated as my Social Security Number, banking info was compromised by accessing government systems and downloading the info without my consent or knowledge. What other information did he gather on me or others? This is wrong and illegal. I have no idea who has my information now.”Today on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Sydney Saubestre, senior policy analyst at New America’s Open Technology Institute, about what data DOGE has accessed, why the government department is claiming it requires that access, and whether or not it is fair to call some of this access a “data breach.”“[DOGE] haven’t been able to articulate why they want access to some of these data files other than broad ‘waste, fraud, and abuse.’ That, ethically, to me, points to it being a data breach.”Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes...

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

  It has probably happened to you before.You and a friend are talking—not texting, not DMing, not FaceTiming—but talking, 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 listening to me?”This question has been around for years and, today, it’s far from a conspiracy theory. Modern smartphones can and do listen to users for voice searches, smart assistant integration, and, obviously, phone calls. It’s not too outlandish to believe, then, that the microphones on smartphones could be used to listen to other conversations without users knowing about it.Recent news stories don’t help, either.In January, Apple agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that the company had eavesdropped on users’ conversations through its smart assistant Siri, and that it shared the recorded conversations with marketers for ad targeting. The lead plaintiff in the case specifically claimed that she and her daughter were recorded without their consent, which resulted in them receiving multiple ads for Air Jordans.In agreeing to pay the settlement, though, Apple denied any wrongdoing, with a spokesperson telling the BBC:“Siri data has never been used to build marketing profiles and it has never been sold to anyone for any purpose.”But statements like this have done little to ease public anxiety. Tech companies have been caught in multiple lies in the past, privacy invasions happen thousands of times a day, and ad targeting feels extreme entirely because it is.Where, then, does the truth lie?Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with David Ruiz, we speak with Electronic Frontier Foundation Staff Technologist Lena Cohen about the most mind-boggling forms of corporate surveillance—including an experimental ad-tracking technology that emitted ultrasonic sound waves—specific audience segments that marketing companies make when targeting people with ads, and, of course, whether our phones are really listening to us.“Companies are collecting so much information about us and in such covert ways that it really feels like they’re listening to us.”Tune in today.You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer...

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• What Google Chrome knows about you, with Carey Parker

  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 questions, looking up recipes, applying for jobs, posting on forums, accessing cloud applications, reading the news, comparing prices, recording Lock and Code, buying concert tickets, signing up for newsletters—then the company that controls that browser likely knows a lot about its users.In the case of Google Chrome, that’s entirely true.Google Chrome knows the websites you visit, the searches you make (through Google), the links you click, and the device model you use, along with the version of Chrome you run. That may sound benign, but when collected over long periods of time, and when coupled with the mountains of data that other Google products collect about you, this wealth of data can paint a deeply intimate portrait of your life.Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with author, podcast host, and privacy advocate Carey Parker about what Google Chrome knows about you, why that data is sensitive, what “Incognito mode” really does, and what you can do in response.We also explain exactly why Google would want this money, and that’s to help it run as an ad company.“That’s what [Google is]. Full stop. Google is an ad company who just happens to make a web browser, and a search engine, and an email app, and a whole lot more than that.”Tune in today.You can also listen to "Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons," the podcast hosted by Carey Parker, here: https://firewallsdontstopdragons.com/You can also find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and whatever preferred podcast platform you use.For all our cybersecurity coverage, visit Malwarebytes Labs at malwarebytes.com/blog.Show notes and credits:Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn't just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.

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