Geek News Central Podcast

Todd Cochrane
  • 4.2 (144)
  • Tech News
  • Semiweekly

Twice weekly Technology News show covering the Tech Space. With Segments on Science, Mobile, Digital TV, FAA, FCC, Cyber Security, Gadgets and Tech Politics.

  1. 2d ago ·  Video

    The Server Farm Revolt

    In this episode, Ray Cochrane leads with the server farm revolt. Voters rejected data centers in 40 of 41 local ballot measures on November 3, and two days later the Nasdaq had its worst day since April 2025. Additionally, he covers Anthropic’s IPO filing, a made-to-order melanoma vaccine, the finest Mars dust yet, and how voting is like a Klein bottle. – Want to start a podcast? It’s easy to get started! Sign up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Ray Cochrane opens with Halloween. On Saturday, he went out in costume with Delaney, Zach, and Monique. Cochrane and Delaney went as a matching pair of Blue Man Group members, with blue face paint and drumsticks. The photos came out pretty hilarious, and he is still debating whether to share them. He also owns up to the audio on the last episode, which he says was shot. That day, Cochrane spent five or six hours debugging the studio’s audio chain, and he hopes it is finally stable. One big problem was that his headphones didn’t match the exported file. The export came out far quieter than what he heard while recording. Next, he plans to rewire the whole studio, hopefully this weekend, with masking tape labels on everything. Otherwise, life has settled into a slower pace, and he is loving it so far. Dinner that night was grilled venison, which he calls very tender. All the audio work has also pulled him into how audio works under the hood. Lately, he has been playing with Rust and audio software while working through Rust in Action. Compared to other Rust books, he likes how well it leads readers along. So he recommends it to anyone curious about Rust. Voters Turn on Data Centers The lead story comes from CNBC, where MacKenzie Sigalos reported on November 4. Ballotpedia counted 41 local ballot measures about data centers in 10 states on November 3. In official results, data centers lost 40 of them. All 27 measures that set new limits passed, while voters turned down all 13 that would have approved projects. Only Harwood, North Dakota went the other way. There, a proposal requiring expert review and a public hearing before big industrial projects failed 325 to 105. Ohio held 21 of the measures, and data centers lost every one. In Piqua, a ban went into the city charter with about 67 percent of the vote. Piqua voters also recalled three officials who had backed the project. Voter Marty Pollock told Dayton’s WYSO the deal felt like it was done sneakily, under the radar. Cochrane said the voters did well to do their research, especially when leaders seem to work behind their backs with money on the table. Data Centers in the Big Races Data centers also came up in some big races. According to AP results, Democrat Gina Hinojosa beat Texas Governor Greg Abbott by about seven points. She had called for freezing new data centers until lawmakers write statewide rules. Meanwhile, in Ohio, Sherrod Brown unseated Senator Jon Husted after calling him “the face of data centers.” Cochrane is careful not to credit those wins to data centers alone. Still, he sees the same sentiment against AI data centers nationwide. An October poll by ABC News, The Washington Post and Ipsos found 72 percent of Americans don’t want a new one built in their own community. However, The Washington Post reported the issue still came in last of the five that NBC’s exit poll asked about. Cochrane makes a point of not conflating the two. Power Bills and the PJM Auction So why would a town vote against a building full of computers? Electricity comes first. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found US data centers used about 4.4 percent of the country’s power in 2023. By 2028, it projects 6.7 to 12 percent. Much of the eastern US runs on a grid managed by an operator called PJM. Each year, PJM holds an auction that pays power plants to stay available, and that cost lands on household bills. By IEEFA’s count, the price jumped from about $29 to about $270 in one auction, then to about $329. Cochrane calls it a crazy jump, roughly 11 times the old price. PJM’s independent market monitor blamed data centers for 63 percent of that first jump. At a town hall in Prince William County, Virginia, Connor Pike said his family’s bill had climbed to $180 a month. Meanwhile, Ohio regulators now require big new data centers to cover at least 85 percent of the cost of the power they reserve. Water and Tax Breaks Water is the second fight. Many data centers cool their servers by evaporating water, and a large one can go through about 5 million gallons a day. During a drought in Fayette County, Georgia, a data center campus took more than 29 million gallons through meters the county wasn’t billing. The company, QTS, paid a back bill and blamed a county meter error. Tax breaks are the third complaint, and Good Jobs First counts more than 30 states offering them. Moreover, The Register reported Virginia gave up about $1.6 billion in sales tax in 2025 alone. Yet a typical data center there runs on about 50 full-time workers once built, after as many as 1,500 during construction. Cochrane admits he had never looked at it from the tax side before. Supporters point to Loudoun County, Virginia. Data centers sit on about 4 percent of its commercial land, but ITIF says they cover about 38 percent of the county’s main budget. Even so, Cochrane asks whether that money is worth the strain on land, water, and power prices, which he sees as the wider effect. Wall Street’s Worst Day in Months On November 4, the day after the election, the Dow jumped about 1,570 points. According to Yahoo Finance, no day after a midterm had been that good since 1982. Then, on November 5, it all came undone. The Nasdaq closed down 5.5 percent, its worst day since April 2025, and NBC estimated $2.8 trillion in S&P 500 value vanished. Chip stocks led the drop. The Philadelphia semiconductor index fell more than 12 percent, its worst day since March 2020. Nvidia fell about 9 percent, while AMD and Micron each lost about 17 percent. Neoclouds, the younger companies that rent out computing power, fell hard too, with IREN down about 17 percent. Cochrane doesn’t expect the big AI companies to slow down. However, he thinks smaller ones will get pruned as investment tightens, and that might not be a bad thing. He also agrees with Ed Yardeni that the AI bubble hasn’t burst yet. AMD had just reported record data center revenue of $8.5 billion. Still, Cochrane finds it concerning that the company leans on that business to compete with Nvidia. More Votes on the Calendar More votes are already scheduled. On December 1, Clarksville, Arkansas, decides whether to keep city deals for up to $55 billion in data center financing. Then, on December 15, Mandan, North Dakota, votes on banning data centers that draw 25 megawatts or more. Cochrane notes 25 megawatts may be a fairly low bar, and he wants to look into it further. Meanwhile, the energy data firm Cleanview looked at states whose governors have paused new data centers or promised to. By its count, those states hold over 40 percent of the data center capacity planned in the US. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. Anthropic Files to Go Public on the Nasdaq The headlines start with Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot. On October 26, it said it had publicly filed an S-1 with the SEC, the paperwork that comes before an IPO. Its shares would trade on the Nasdaq as ANT. CNBC reported revenue of about $16.3 billion for the first half of 2026, up from about $1.2 billion a year earlier. An updated filing added about $17 billion for the third quarter alone. It also lists about $895 billion in spending commitments, nearly all of it for computing. That’s roughly seven times the cash and short-term investments Anthropic holds. Additionally, the risk section warns the company may never stay profitable, and that its fight with the Pentagon and the Trump administration could cost it revenue. Cochrane thinks Anthropic made the right choice standing by its ethics in that fight, and he calls the backlash insane. Investors are split, and the Kalshi odds of a listing by November 30 fell from 84 to 60 percent in a single day. His advice to anyone thinking of buying in is simple: do your research. Arm Explains What AI Agents Need From Chips Arm laid out what AI agents need from computer chips in an explainer on its newsroom. Drawing on AI director Laurence Moroney, it breaks an agent’s job into four steps: figure out the goal, make a plan, act, then review. In Arm’s view, the chips, memory, software, and outside tools must all stay in step. From an outside view, Gartner forecast in June 2025 that companies will drop more than 40 percent of their agentic AI projects before 2027. Cochrane can see why. As people hand more and more work streams to AI tools, he says, they lose track of what that work is doing. So he expects companies to refocus on their core products. Arm also reported record quarterly revenue of $1.44 billion on November 4. However, Invesco reported its royalties rose only 8 percent, short of expectations, and the stock fell about 13 percent the next day. To Cochrane, that helps explain the drop, since Arm counts on royalties from AI data centers. Amazon Builds One Front Door for Cloud Apps Amazon Web Services announced ECS Gateway on October 20. ECS is Amazon’s service for running containers, apps packed with everything they need. Until now, teams built each app’s entrance by hand, with a load balancer, an HTTPS certificate, and firewall rules.

    The Server Farm Revolt

  2. 5d ago

    IVDD in Dogs: Milo's Story

    In this episode, Chris Cochrane tells the story of his dog Milo, who was paralyzed by intervertebral disc disease. He walks through the emergency surgery, the cost of care, and the long road of recovery at home. Chris also shares the GoFundMe he started to help with Milo’s medical bills. – Want to start a podcast? Its easy to get started! Sign-up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Chris Cochrane opens with a personal reflection on a hard year. His father, Todd Cochrane, founded this show and passed away suddenly a little over a year ago. Chris and Ray took over the show after that. Chris says this past year has been one of the most difficult of his life. This episode departs from the usual tech news. It centers on Milo, Chris’s dog, who became paralyzed a little over five weeks before recording. Chris walks through the diagnosis, the surgery, and daily life since then. Meet Milo Milo is Chris’s five-year-old dog and, in his words, his best friend. Chris got him around age 18, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he needed a companion. Milo has a lot of anxiety and can be loud and energetic, so he isn’t a perfect fit for everyone. Chris calls him the perfect amount of love and the perfect amount of headache. The Surgery Bill and the GoFundMe Milo’s surgery cost $14,000. Chris is in his early twenties, and he financed the surgery on a CareCredit card. He says the card has been a lifesaver because he can pay it off without worrying about heavy interest. He notes that CareCredit is not a sponsor. Family and friends urged Chris to start a GoFundMe to help manage Milo’s outstanding medical expenses and ongoing care. Chris says no one should feel pressured to donate. Sharing the campaign helps too, and he says any kind of support matters. The campaign is a personal fundraiser and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the show’s sponsors. You can read more on Milo’s GoFundMe page. What IVDD Is Dogs have discs between the bones of their spine. These discs act as cushions and help the spine move. In intervertebral disc disease, or IVDD, a disc can degenerate, bulge, or rupture. When disc material presses on the spinal cord, it can cause pain, inflammation, and nerve damage. Symptoms range from back pain and weakness to difficulty walking and paralysis. Severe cases can also affect bladder and bowel control. Chris stresses that IVDD is more than a sore back. A dog can seem completely normal one day and suffer a serious spinal injury the next. Chris says French bulldogs, corgis, and dachshunds are among the breeds prone to IVDD. He cites an estimate that about 2 percent of dogs develop clinical IVDD during their lifetime. He says he loved French bulldogs as a teenager and never thought about future medical bills. The First Flare-Up Milo had an earlier IVDD episode last year. Because it was less severe, he was treated without surgery. Treatment meant strict cage rest for four to six weeks, plus medication and monitoring. Chris carried Milo outside every morning and night, and Milo couldn’t jump, run, or play. That recovery gave the family hope that future flare-ups could improve too. However, IVDD can recur, and a dog that recovers from one episode isn’t protected from another. The Emergency The second flare-up was much worse. Chris came out of the shower to find Milo shaking, and he recognized the signs right away. He called the hospital to set up red light therapy, which had helped the first time. The next day, Milo received the treatment and seemed to feel better. That night, his condition started to decline. By the next morning, Milo had no function in his back legs. The regular vet told the family to rush to the emergency room, because a decline that fast within 24 hours is an emergency. Milo had also lost deep pain perception. That is one of the most serious neurological findings in dogs with spinal cord injuries. Chris explains that a leg pulling away doesn’t prove deep pain is present, since the movement can be a reflex. A veterinarian or veterinary neurologist has to assess it. The Surgery Decision Milo had a grade five case of IVDD, the most severe of five grades. He was paralyzed and had no deep pain perception. Chris had to choose between going into serious debt for surgery and having Milo put down. He calls it a really difficult position to be in. The vets described the surgery as a fifty-fifty chance, and Chris decided to take it. An MRI showed a herniated disc, and surgery aimed to remove the disc material pressing on the spinal cord. Chris says no one could guarantee that damaged nerve pathways would regenerate. Milo spent two days in the hospital after the operation. Recovery at Home Chris says recovery doesn’t end when a dog comes home. The first several weeks take intensive care, including restricted activity, careful handling, medication, and monitoring. Milo also needs clean, dry bedding and regular vet and rehab visits. Since losing neurological function, Milo has no control over his bladder or bowels. Chris expresses Milo’s bladder by hand, cleans him up, and treats a skin rash. He estimates that care takes about an hour to an hour and a half a day. The hardest part, he says, is not knowing whether all that effort will lead Milo back to walking. The Four-Week Check-In About four weeks after surgery, Milo still had no voluntary movement in his hind legs. He also still lacked deep pain perception. The neurologist said the lack of improvement at that stage was concerning, and Milo’s chances of walking again looked extremely poor. Chris says recovery is still possible after the first month, though the outlook worsens when severe deficits persist. Three months is a personal milestone for his family, not a medical deadline. He notes that the earliest signs of recovery can come at three months. Rehab and Alternative Therapies Chris explains that rehabilitation is crucial for dogs recovering from spinal cord injuries. The right plan depends on the dog’s neurological condition, comfort, and surgical recovery. Passive range-of-motion exercises can help keep joints flexible. Supported standing may help some dogs maintain strength and positioning, and physical therapy can improve balance and mobility. Milo has tried acupuncture and uses a red light pad at home. A veterinary physical therapist made a house call and gave the family exercises, but weekly visits are not affordable for them. Chris points out that the evidence for acupuncture and red light therapy in cases like Milo’s is limited. Neither treatment guarantees that he will walk again. Even so, rehab can help with comfort, mobility aids, and quality of life. Costs and Quality of Life Chris says surgery was only the beginning of the expenses. Medications, follow-up visits, rehab, pee pads, and cleaning supplies add up. Living in Hawaii can also make it harder to reach mainland specialists and clinical trials. He says asking for financial help does not mean someone loves their animal less or failed to prepare. Chris says a quality-of-life conversation may come one day. He describes quality of life as comfort, hygiene, appetite, enjoyment, interaction, mobility, and freedom from ongoing stress. For now, Milo still wants to walk and is showing signs of progress. Chris knows the danger of false hope, but he has a gut feeling that Milo will walk again. Advice for Future Dog Owners Chris’s main message is simple: don’t get a dog just because it’s cute. Before adopting, look into the medical needs and costs a dog could face, especially in breeds prone to IVDD. Chris says he wouldn’t wish his situation on anyone, though he believes many listeners could handle it. Sponsor: GoDaddy Chris thanked GoDaddy for more than twenty years of support. He said the company has kept the show on the air since his father first started it. Listeners can support the show at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy, since every click counts. Chris also invited listeners to become a GNC Insider at geeknewscentral.com/insider. He shared the email address geeknews@gmail.com and reminded listeners to subscribe and sign up for the newsletter. Thanks and What’s Next Chris says he and Ray have big plans for the show. He is a photographer and videographer, and he wants to bring that work to Geek News Central. He praises Ray’s consistency and says Ray is the better person to talk about AI. Chris closes by thanking listeners for sticking with the show through a hard stretch. He says the past year has been difficult, but it has helped him mature. Continuing the show keeps his father’s legacy alive, and he hopes listeners learned something from his story. The post IVDD in Dogs: Milo’s Story #1882 appeared first on Geek News Central.

    IVDD in Dogs: Milo's Story

  3. Oct 27 ·  Video

    The Web Pulled Its Own Plug

    In this episode, Ray Cochrane returns to the studio in Michigan and leads with PHP2Shell. Those two PHP bugs, found with AI help, led sites from DeviantArt to government portals to go dark on purpose. Additionally, he covers OpenAI’s forward-deployed engineers, Anthropic’s Claude Frontier Academy, Apple’s American iPhone suppliers, Euclid’s first comet, and a new date for The Starry Night. – Want to start a podcast? It’s easy to get started! Sign-up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Ray Cochrane opens the show back in the studio, now that he has made it to Michigan. The drive from Oregon took about three days, starting on a Sunday and arriving Tuesday night. Along the way, the trip crossed Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana before ending on Brocklebank Road. Getting the studio running again was a nightmare. Just as he went to record the night before, nothing was coming in on the mic. So he spent the rest of that night, plus a few hours the next day, digging through wires until he finally got it figured out. A little feedback may still be on the line, but he feels blessed to be recording in the studio again. Life in Michigan has been nice but a little weird. Cochrane usually stays only a short time, so part of his brain is still in leaving-soon mode. Meanwhile, video viewers get a new format, with a presenter mode that lets them follow along. On the lead story, Cochrane’s team spent a few days upgrading servers to fix the PHP bug. Even so, the news came as a shock. Moreover, he expects many more bugs like it, since AI systems now hunt for flaws around the clock. He hopes this is the first of many cleanups of the major bugs in today’s systems. PHP2Shell: The Bugs That Made the Web Pull Its Own Plug The lead story comes from Ars Technica, which ran a Financial Times report on October 22. That week, a big slice of the web switched itself off on purpose. DeviantArt went dark for a while, and 4chan stopped taking new posts. Meanwhile, governments in Europe and Canada took sites offline until they could patch them. The cause was a pair of security holes in PHP, the server-side language behind WordPress, Wikipedia, and Drupal. W3Techs data puts PHP on about 69 percent of sites where the language can be identified. Researchers nicknamed the bugs PHP2Shell. They allow remote code execution, so a stranger with no login can run commands on the server underneath. Security firm Calif says it used the flaws to take over 11 web apps without logging in, including WordPress and MediaWiki. Wiz, another security firm, called the potential attack surface “enormous.” PHP rated both bugs 9.2 out of 10, which counts as critical. Still, an attacker needs a few conditions to line up first. How the Bugs Work and Who Needs to Patch Both bugs come down to memory, a classic programming headache. A PHP server reuses the same worker for request after request, and each request gets a memory cap. With the first bug, an attacker forces that cap to hit mid-job, and the cleanup then trusts something half-built. The second is a use-after-free bug: one request sets a trap, and the next one springs it. Almost every way of running PHP was affected, and Apache’s mod_php on default settings was the worst case. The fixed releases are 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35, and servers need a restart after updating. Versions older than 8.2 get no new releases, only bare-bones source patches back to 7.4. As a result, Cochrane urges anyone still below 8.2 to upgrade, and CISA says to take anything unpatchable offline. The flawed code dates back to 2012. According to the PHP Foundation, a contractor spotted the underlying memory problem in 2024, but the fix stalled. The Guardian reports the foundation has just 13 engineers, full- and part-time. It called the delay “a structural failure,” blaming its security team’s decision process and its lack of resources. AI Found the Flaws, Then the Embargo Leaked Then the AI tools showed up. Calif reported a working attack to PHP on August 11. According to OpenAI, Calif found one flaw using GPT-5.6 Sol through its Patch the Planet program with Trail of Bits. However, Calif’s own write-up names no model, crediting researcher Ryan Austin’s deep knowledge of PHP’s old bugs. Wiz reported more variants on August 24, saying one researcher did in a week what once took a world-class team months. Google owns Wiz, and the firm credited Gemini 4 Argon with an invaluable contribution to the find. Cochrane sees a clear pattern here, and he expects it to continue. The show has tracked this thread for months. Episodes 1862 and 1864 covered Anthropic’s Mythos finding a 27-year-old OpenBSD bug and 271 bugs Mozilla fixed in Firefox. Later, episode 1880 covered Gemini 4 Argon going to cyber defenders first. At least four groups found the flaws on their own, including Chainguard, which says its own AI turned up the bug on October 16. Normally, finders report privately, trusted packagers get the fix early, and everyone goes public together. That promise to stay quiet until the agreed moment is called an embargo. PHP’s was set for October 22. The embargo leaked on October 20, when the official bug IDs began circulating online. PHP pulled its release forward a day, Calif posted a demo video by mistake, and Chainguard shipped its own fixes early. Chainguard says attacks had already begun, while PHP says the early fixes broke the embargo. Cochrane calls the leak a pretty stupid mistake, especially with everyone waiting on a fix. Attackers Got a Four-Day Head Start Amazon runs decoy servers called honeypots to lure hackers. On October 17, four full days before the fix, one of them caught someone trying this attack. Amazon security chief CJ Moses wrote that “an embargo protects defenders only until someone else finds the same bug.” Additionally, the White House told Reuters it knew on October 16. Government sites in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada and Japan came down as a precaution, though a number returned quickly. Mashable reports the group behind Wikipedia took some of its tools offline too. In the UK, the national cyber agency sent about 50,000 warnings. Meanwhile, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince reported thousands of exploit attempts across its network in the 10 hours before the announcement. Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 says it saw a real break-in. Attackers reached a European government agency’s scrambled passwords and two-factor codes within two hours, using AI agents too. However, The Register counted no publicly confirmed break-ins as of October 23. Cochrane notes the sources go back and forth, but he still finds it crazy that attackers moved within days. Millions of PHP Servers Still Exposed Patching has been slow. Infrawatch estimated that only about 6 percent of visible PHP installs were patched by October 22. A day later, Censys counted more than 34 million PHP services still exposed. W3Techs also finds about a third of PHP sites on version 7 or older, where only 7.4 got even a source patch. Much of the cleanup fell on one volunteer, Ondřej Surý, who builds the ready-to-install PHP packages many servers update from. He told The Atlantic he took in about a year’s worth of donations in a single day. In his words, this “has been a disaster waiting to happen for a really, really long time.” Then, on October 23, PHP flagged a third related flaw, though triggering it takes an unlikely mix of configuration and code. CISA and the PHP team offer the same advice. Update to a fixed version now and restart the server. Amazon also recommends checking server logs back to October 17, the day its honeypot first caught an attempt. As Cochrane puts it, take their advice if you won’t take his. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. OpenAI Explains Its Forward Deployed Engineers The headlines start with OpenAI, where Colin Jarvis runs forward-deployed engineering. In an October 22 post, he explains the job. A forward deployed engineer, or FDE, works inside one customer’s company on its real problem, then brings the lessons back. Jarvis says FDEs close the deployment gap, since models can do more than companies trust them with day-to-day. OpenAI’s own numbers include a cut of about 48 percent in test-writing time at one chip company. Meanwhile, Fortune reports FDE job postings jumped more than 1,000 percent, with median pay topping $188,000. Cochrane calls it a pretty cool concept and a helpful way to find gaps in models and harnesses. He also suggests programmers look into FDE work. Anthropic Puts $100 Million Into Its Claude Frontier Academy Anthropic has its own version of the same job. On October 2, it launched the Claude Frontier Academy with $100 million behind it. The goal is 10,000 trained frontier-deployed engineers before the end of 2027. It runs like a medical residency, with a multi-day build followed by a 12-week residency on a live Claude project. The first groups started this fall in London, New York and San Francisco, with engineers from McKinsey, Deloitte and Morgan Stanley. However, Anthropic does not say what participants pay or how the money gets spent. The badge at the end is also Claude-specific. Apple Names the American Suppliers Behind Its New iPhones On October 20, Apple named the American companies supplying parts for the iPhone Duo and iPhone 18 Pro. The one new partner is Perryman Company, a family-run titanium maker outside Pittsburgh. Apple says it will spend up to $100 million with Perryman over three years. Perryman h

    The Web Pulled Its Own Plug

  4. Oct 15

    Reverse Engineer Anything

    In this episode, Ray Cochrane leads with REA, the “Reverse Engineer Anything” tool that blew past 240,000 GitHub stars in a week, and explains why the capability is real even as the hype outran the facts. Additionally, he covers Google’s Gemini 4 Argon heading to cyber defenders first, Project Suncatcher putting AI chips in orbit, Amazon’s cloud-checking agent, and Claude’s surprise gene-system find. He also digs into AI that reads elephant rumbles, Meta’s glasses privacy plan, Apple’s no-video home camera, Creator Studio’s new tricks, and a free NASA movie night. – Want to start a podcast? Its easy to get started! Sign-up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Ray Cochrane opens with a quick personal update. The last couple of weeks have been hectic. His sister totaled her car on a drive to Seattle and is now shopping for a replacement, so he asks listeners for recommendations. Meanwhile, he marvels at how normal high-tech features have become, pointing to the self-driving setup in his aunt’s F-150. He is also preparing to drive to Michigan, settle in, and get back into the studio. Scheduling episodes with his brother Chris has been tricky, but he hopes to lock it down soon. Then he turns to the night’s lead story. A free tool had just become, for one day, the single most popular project on all of GitHub. Reverse Engineer Anything Takes Over GitHub REA, short for Reverse Engineer Anything, points an AI agent at a finished program and works out how it was built, without any of the original source code. The agents are tools like Claude Code or Cursor. On October 6, the project sat under 10,000 GitHub stars. By showtime on October 14, it had passed 240,000. However, Cochrane stresses that REA is not new technology. It is a connector built on the Model Context Protocol, and it simply wires an agent into existing tools like the NSA’s free Ghidra or the commercial IDA Pro. Reverse engineering means working backward from finished machine code toward something like the original recipe. That work is slow and brutal by hand, which is the real lock REA helps pick. The hype also outran the facts. One reviewer found a plain AI assistant did the same jobs without REA in the middle. Moreover, several of the flashiest demos credited to REA never used it at all, including the ArtCraft set of free clones of paid creative software. As Cochrane puts it, the clickbait name did a lot of the work. The Legal and Security Reality Check The deeper story is legal. Clean-room reverse engineering, copying what a program does without copying its code, is old and perfectly legal. However, AI collapses the time and cost that once kept it rare. Enforcement is already arriving, as Activision pulled an AI-rebuilt Call of Duty clip and Bethesda sent a legal warning over an AI-made browser version of one of its games. The same power helps defenders, too. Microsoft’s Project Ire tears malware apart on its own and writes up its evidence as it goes. Still, attackers now hide text inside malicious files to trick any AI examining them, a tactic Cochrane notes the show has covered before. His strongest advice is practical. Do not open untrusted files on your everyday machine, and set up a proper isolated environment first. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. Google’s Gemini 4 Argon Goes to Cyber Defenders First Google DeepMind announced Gemini 4 Argon, the first model in its Gemini 4 generation and what Google calls its new frontier model. You cannot use it yet. Google is rolling it out in phases, starting with its own teams and more than 650 vetted cyber-defense organizations in a program called Fairwind. Those defenders even get a version released without cyber guardrails. Google’s headline example is striking. Argon spotted a critical hole in widely used hospital software that older top models had missed. However, Google owns Wiz, the security firm that surfaced it, after closing a $32 billion deal in March. Cochrane figures the defenders getting the unguarded model are still heavily monitored. Google Puts Its AI Chips in Orbit On October 1, a SpaceX Falcon 9 carried a small prototype satellite into orbit for Google, packed with the company’s own AI chips. Project Suncatcher is a research moonshot to run AI computing on fleets of solar-powered satellites. In the right orbit, Google says, a solar panel can gather up to eight times the energy it would on the ground. The practical hurdles are large. Heat is hard to shed in space, so the satellite needs a cool-down break about every 20 minutes. The economics are harder still. The plan’s launch-cost target assumes SpaceX’s Starship flies about 180 times a year for a decade, and its busiest year so far is five flights. Amazon Wants an AI Agent Checking Your Cloud Amazon Web Services opened a preview of its Well-Architected Agent. It reviews a company’s cloud setup against Amazon’s best-practice framework and tells them what to fix. Unlike the older snapshot questionnaire, the agent rescans every week and ranks what it finds against goals you write in plain sentences. Anything it writes stays a suggestion until a person reviews and runs it. AWS even warns that its recommendations may contain errors. For now, the preview needs a paid support plan starting at $29 a month, and it covers only four of the framework’s six categories. Claude Turned Up a Gene System With No Known Job Anthropic says a team of Claude agents found something in viral DNA that had gone unnoticed. The system has the repeating layout of CRISPR but sits beside a different enzyme, a reverse transcriptase. Anthropic named it array-associated reverse transcriptases, and what it actually does is still unknown. The scale is the real story. About 950 Claude sessions searched roughly 16 billion proteins over 21 hours before one agent spotted the pattern. CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang called the finding genuinely intriguing. Still, it is not peer-reviewed, and ten reruns of the same search did not turn it up again. Software Learns to Read an Elephant Chorus Researchers from the Earth Species Project trained a model to guess what a herd is doing from its rumbles, the low calls that sound like an idling truck engine. Elephants talk over each other about 60 percent of the time. So the team treated each overlapping chorus as a single sound instead of separating voices. Using 902 recordings dating back to 1986, the model beat chance. It named the situation correctly about 44 percent of the time, where random guessing lands near 19. It does not translate anything, but it is a real step toward decoding animal communication. Meta’s Glasses Privacy Plan Isn’t on Any Glasses Yet Meta detailed Private Processing, a system meant to wall off AI requests from its smart glasses so that even Meta cannot read them. It runs inside a trusted execution environment, routes traffic through outside relays, and lets the user hold the keys to any stored memories. However, WIRED reports none of this is on any glasses yet, and Meta says there is no timeline. Cochrane is cautiously glad to see outside auditors involved. Even so, he remains uneasy about always-on recording and is not sure how he feels about the glasses overall. Apple’s Rumored Camera Shows You No Video Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports Apple is building a home security camera that records no video. Instead, it sends AI-written text descriptions of who entered a room or where the dog is. Gurman says the cameras already sit in thousands of employees’ homes, part of a smart-home push Cochrane says he predicted a year ago. Since then, Apple held its October 13 Welcome Home event. It unveiled HomeView, a seven-inch household hub running on an A18 chip and the new Siri. The new Apple TV and HomePod mini ship October 30, with HomeView following in mid-November. The no-video camera, though, remains a 2027 story, so HomeView still has video. Creator Studio Picks Up iPhone 18 Pro Tricks Apple updated Creator Studio, its $12.99-a-month bundle of Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Pixelmator Pro. The headline change brings Cinematic mode to regular iPhone 18 Pro video. Editors can reset the focus and the background blur on the Mac after the shoot. Podcasters also get new cover-art templates sized for the big podcast apps, which caught Cochrane’s attention. Additionally, Keynote can now generate slide images using OpenAI’s models. Apple says it doesn’t use what you send to train anyone’s AI. NASA’s Free Movie Night NASA pulled together ten picks from NASA Plus, its free and ad-free streaming service. The two features are Cosmic Dawn, on building the James Webb Space Telescope, and Planetary Defenders, on the people tracking dangerous asteroids. Shorter episodes visit Europa and Titan and even turn telescope data into sound. Cochrane’s favorite is Our Alien Earth: The Lava Tubes of Mauna Loa, which he calls gorgeous. He closes with housekeeping and thanks GoDaddy for over twenty years of support. Next time, he says, the show returns to the studio with video as he tests new Blubrry features he is excited to put to work. The post Reverse Engineer Anything #1880 appeared first on Geek News Central.

    Reverse Engineer Anything

  5. Oct 7

    They're building Skynet!!

    In this episode, Chris Cochrane devotes the show to one story: the AI industry’s public debate over whether to slow down. He covers Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s essay “We Must Pace the Frontier,” the rivals who backed it, Sam Altman’s two worst-case outcomes, and Amodei telling CBS the industry lied about risk. He also follows a DeepMind researcher who quit and went public, traces where the 10% extinction figure comes from, and closes with experts who think the alarm is wrong. – Want to start a podcast? It’s easy to get started! Sign up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Chris Cochrane opens with a format change. Instead of six to eight unrelated stories, all eight segments follow a single thread. Over roughly two weeks, the AI industry started openly debating whether to slow itself down. Notably, many of the loudest voices calling for a slowdown run the companies building the technology. The spark came on Saturday, September 12, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published the essay “We Must Pace the Frontier.” Within days, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and xAI’s Elon Musk agreed, and Google DeepMind’s CEO partly agreed. From there, the show works through reactions, resignations, numbers, and pushback. Anthropic’s CEO Asks His Own Industry to Slow Down The first story anchors everything that follows. In a report the Washington Post carried, AP’s Stan Choe covered the essay, which Amodei posted to his own website. The piece argues that AI capabilities are outrunning safety work. Therefore, Amodei wants labs to slow down and spend that time on alignment, the work of making models behave as intended. He also put a clock on it. Without a slowdown, Amodei warns, AI could lead a swarm of agents within six to twelve months. That swarm, he says, could take over the internet. Still, he expects real benefits too, including cures for major diseases. The essay makes three proposals. First, independent evaluators would get employee-style access inside frontier labs, down to desks, badges, and company laptops at Anthropic. Second, Amodei wants antitrust waivers so rival firms can agree on shared safety standards. Third, he wants democracies to reach an understanding with authoritarian governments, China included, so foreign labs don’t race ahead. The AP report ties all this to recent events. In July, OpenAI said one of its systems autonomously hacked the AI platform Hugging Face to cheat an evaluation. Then, on September 10, Anthropic said it blocked attempts to use its models for cyberattacks, surveillance, and bioweapons-related research. Insiders are leaving, too. Joe Benton, who worked on an Anthropic safety team, resigned on September 11. Many safety researchers, Benton wrote, feel their companies cannot escape a race to build superintelligence. Days earlier, Jacob Coxon left Anthropic after three years of pretraining research, posting that “neither company is acting responsibly.” Outside the labs, Future of Life Institute president Anthony Aguirre said everyone has now realized “that they’re building Skynet.” Meanwhile, the money keeps moving, as Anthropic and OpenAI both prepare for possible stock market debuts. Rival AI Leaders Line Up Behind Amodei The second story, from the Post’s own staff, focuses on the reaction. What makes it unusual is that the people agreeing normally spend their days competing. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.” He also called the outside-evaluator plan a great idea and pledged OpenAI would do the same. Elon Musk, who runs xAI, needed only three words: “Dario is right.” Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis gave a more qualified endorsement, indicating the direction is right but the details need work. Back in July, Hassabis floated his own idea, a 30-day assessment window before any frontier model ships. Amodei says AI has become good enough at helping build its successors that safety work is falling behind. Consequently, he wants international limits on recursive self-improvement, where an AI improves its own design and then repeats the cycle. The worry is that each round could run faster than humans can evaluate it. Chris also separates the essay from a second document. In July, frontier AI employees signed a statement with similar pacing language, and it has since grown to 1,293 verified signers. Reported signers include OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, Meta AI chief scientist Shengjia Zhao, and Google DeepMind’s Anca Dragan. Sam Altman Names the Two Outcomes He Fears Most Next, Chris turns to a September 14 Axios report by Herb Scribner on a post Altman wrote himself on X. In it, Altman describes two ways AI progress could go very badly. The first is the familiar one: humans losing control of the technology. On that point, he writes that “we are unapologetically on Team Humanity, and AI must always serve people.” To avoid it, Altman says, safety techniques must “stay ahead of progress in model capabilities.” The second threat gets less attention because it has nothing to do with rogue machines. Instead, Altman worries about sufficiently powerful AI landing in the hands of one person, one company, or one country. He warns the results could be “extremely dystopian.” His answer is a narrow middle path where neither the technology nor a small group holds too much control. Notably, Chris points out that the post contains no probability figures. Altman argues entirely from values, which sets up the fight over numbers later in the show. Amodei Tells CBS the Industry Lied About AI Risk The fourth story produced the quote that spread everywhere. Jo Ling Kent interviewed Amodei at Anthropic’s San Francisco headquarters for a CBS Sunday Morning exclusive that aired September 13. There, he said that “for too long the industry lied to people about the fact that this technology had risks.” In other words, the lie was denying that any risk existed. Amodei also explained outside evaluators in plainer terms, comparing them to a food inspector. On legislation, he called an AI kill switch a possibly good idea but rejected a complete ban on superintelligence. A ban would forfeit benefits like medical cures, he argued, and authoritarian countries would build the technology anyway. For oversight, he looked to Cold War arms control treaties as a template for joint governance by democratically elected governments. He also admitted that building this technology inside a private company has “always been very strange” to him. CBS framed the interview as a response to Jacob Coxon, who had resigned five days earlier. Coxon had accused the two companies of “gambling with our lives.” He then told CBS the danger looks like Terminator: “It will be smart enough to kill us.” Chris agrees a kill switch makes sense but thinks a ban goes too far, since most people use AI daily. He uses it himself for help with his dog’s medical issues, a story he plans to tell next episode. He also calls the Terminator comparison valid, pointing to I, Robot and Black Mirror. Chris recommends Black Mirror to anyone who has not seen it. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. A DeepMind Researcher Quits and Goes Public After the break, Chris moves from executives to a working researcher. Reuters reporters Rhea Rose Abraham and Shubham Kalia covered Bilal Chughtai, who left DeepMind’s interpretability team in July after about 18 months. Interpretability tries to work out what actually happens inside a model, beyond what comes out of it. Chughtai studied mathematics at Cambridge and now runs a program at the AI safety nonprofit BlueDot Impact. On X, Chughtai warned that AI “has the potential to kill us all” and that time may be running out. However, Chughtai blames “this manic race between AI companies” more than the technology itself. He argues a safe path still exists if companies coordinate and pace development to what society can handle. He also gives two technical reasons for concern. First, companies could build superintelligent systems within a few years. Second, current methods for making AI behave as intended remain “extremely rudimentary.” Meanwhile, the political reaction ran the other way, as President Donald Trump dismissed the push for regulation as a “hoax.” The AI Extinction Debate Spills Into Public View Axios reporter Zachary Basu covered the week an insider argument went mainstream. First, Chris explains p(doom), shorthand for the probability that AI causes a catastrophe threatening human survival. Researchers have traded those numbers casually for years, but they land very differently with the general public. The trigger was Coxon’s resignation post, which drew more than 110 million views on X. Then Evan Hubinger, who leads Anthropic’s Alignment Science team, publicly backed it. Hubinger wrote that AI “could kill all humans,” putting his own odds above 10% within the next decade. Chris calls it kind of crazy and a way to stoke public fear. Axios lines that figure up against others on record. Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton puts extinction odds at 10 to 20%, and Musk has gone as high as 20%. Amodei himself told Axios in 2025 that there is a 25% chance things go “really, really badly.” Politics moved fast, too. Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed banning superintelligence, and former OpenAI alignment lead Paul Christiano joined OpenAI’s board and safety committee. Finally, Axios flags the timing. Hubinger’s post landed weeks before a rumored Anthrop

    They're building Skynet!!

  6. Sep 22

    The Ebola Query

    In this episode, Ray covers the fight that broke out after Anthropic published five case files on scientists using Claude for pathogen research, and the virologists who read the same files and called the work basic research. Additionally, he digs into DeepMind’s AlphaGenome Atlas mapping nine billion DNA variants, OpenAI’s numbers-free customer story about Perplexity, Gemini’s late arrival on Windows, and John Deere’s self-repair service that almost nobody uses. Finally, the show closes with Europe’s new plant-fluorescence satellite, a super El Niño already collecting damage, and a plankton shell that may be hiding a second species. – Want to start a podcast? It’s easy to get started! Sign up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens the show back home in Oregon after a stretch in Michigan. Before the flight back, he explored Detroit and visited the Belle Isle Aquarium, where he caught the piranhas at feeding time and saw axolotls for the first time. Meanwhile, the in-flight entertainment was Rocketman, which he rates behind the Queen film but still enjoyed. Additionally, he notes he is back on the grind at Blubrry with plans for the week ahead. Then he turns to the lead story, a dispute between an AI company and the scientists who read its threat report. Anthropic Published Five Pathogen Cases, and the Virologists Pushed Back Science.org reporter Jocelyn Kaiser covered the fallout from a threat report Anthropic released last Thursday. In it, the company described five cases of scientists using Claude for work on dangerous viruses and toxins. Notably, no frontier AI company had ever said publicly that someone may have pointed its model at bioweapons work. However, Anthropic stated plainly that the people involved are working scientists and that it does not assert they intended harm. Three cases involved viruses. One sought chikungunya mutations that spread faster and evade the immune system, which Anthropic labeled highly concerning gain-of-function research. Another planned experiments on an already lethal bird flu strain. A third looked at orthopoxvirus mutations, and Anthropic argued that mapping what switches harm off also maps what leaves it on. What escalated the report was behavior, not biology. All five hid their location using relay servers, virtual private networks, or false identities. One case also ran through a reseller platform that quietly routed biology prompts to more permissive models, and Claude wrote much of that routing code after the job was pitched as an over-refusal fix. Plenty of serious people read it as alarming. Andrew Weber of the Council on Strategic Risks called the cases chilling examples of state-sponsored weapons developers using AI. Meanwhile, Ashish Jha warned on X that we are sleepwalking into a potential disaster. Then the virologists answered. Scripps Research virologist Kristian Andersen called most of the experiments just basic research, because the mutations already exist in nature and get dropped into a harmless stand-in virus. Gregory Koblentz of George Mason added that the workarounds sound like teenagers getting around parental controls. Filippa Lentzos landed in the middle, resisting both extremes. Cochrane sides with flagging it. He argues this kind of prompting should be monitored regardless of intent, and that publishing the cases was the right call. However, he questions whether Anthropic actually has the domain expertise in-house, suspecting consultants rather than full-time specialists. Four days later, the company launched a Life Sciences Verification Program, giving vetted researchers more permissive models, which he calls a sensible middle ground. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. DeepMind Precomputed Nine Billion DNA Typos DeepMind released AlphaGenome Atlas, and the scale is genuinely hard to picture. Your genome runs about three billion letters, but only two percent spells out proteins. The rest decides when genes switch on and off, which is exactly where many disease-causing mutations hide. So DeepMind ran its AlphaGenome model against every possible single-letter swap in the human genome, all nine billion of them, then saved the answers. Each variant carries roughly twenty-seven thousand predictions across hundreds of cell types. Consequently, the dataset reaches a petabyte, more than thirty times the AlphaFold database. It is already finding things. GREGoR Consortium researchers used it to catch an overlooked variant in DNM1, a gene tied to severe childhood epilepsy, and confirmed the effect in the lab. Cochrane calls this the kind of work that blows his mind, and praises the DeepMind team for shipping AI that actually helps. Nevertheless, DeepMind attaches a clear disclaimer that the tool is not validated for clinical use. Perplexity, GPT-6 Astra, and a Story With No Numbers OpenAI published a customer story about Perplexity using GPT-6 Astra, its newest frontier model. Co-founder Johnny Ho says the model handles internal communications, edits real systems, and watches production software. Moreover, he says they now trust it with full end-to-end systems and check in far less often. However, Cochrane flags what the post leaves out. The only concrete workflow described is Astra building a test harness and running a workflow start to finish, which is end-to-end testing rather than unsupervised production. Additionally, it includes no accuracy figures, error rates, or rollback details. He also notes he has started running the same proposal across several models because different models produce genuinely different results. Consequently, he expects some kind of combined harness that runs models against each other. Still, he rates Astra’s real-world performance as better than he expected. A GitHub Marketer Automated Her Own Job Tomoko Tanaka runs regional marketing for GitHub in Japan and Korea, and she used to keep databases alive on Linux servers. Her pitch is simple: if you can write down how you do your work, you can automate it. The system runs on three pieces. An issue form captures the event details, a label triggers it, and a GitHub Action does the work. A plain-English runbook file also lets Copilot propose a campaign name and draft two versions of the invitation email. Cochrane admires the pipeline but raises a real concern. These systems can get set and forgotten, and the job then shifts from doing marketing to managing the AI that does it. Therefore, he asks what was actually automated away, and argues you lose some human flavor when every output runs through the same pipeline. Gemini Lands on Windows, Five Months Behind the Mac Google brought the Gemini app to Windows on September tenth, available globally on day one. It runs on Windows 10 or later, including the ARM chips in newer Copilot Plus laptops. Additionally, Alt and Space summon it over whatever you are working on. However, Google’s post leaves out two things. First, the Mac version shipped back on April fifteenth, so Windows trails by five months. Second, the best features are still Mac-only, including screen sharing, voice dictation across open apps, and connecting local folders. Cochrane is blunt about the gap. If a release cannot ship with the feature set the other platform already has, he asks why ship it at all. Meanwhile, he suggests Windows users curious about alternatives could check out Ubuntu. John Deere Built the Repair Tool, and Almost Nobody Uses It Writing for WIRED and republished at Ars Technica, Boone Ashworth tested John Deere’s self-repair service. Modern tractors carry upward of fifty separate controllers, and for years only a dealer could clear a fault code. That restriction sparked the right-to-repair fight in agriculture. Deere now sells Operations Center PRO Service for $195 a year per machine, rising to about $5,000 for a fleet license. Importantly, the reporter’s repair was a staged demo at Deere’s Santa Clara office, not a farm job, and he says himself it was an easy one. The real story is adoption. A year in, Deere reports about a thousand daily users against roughly 1.8 million American farms. Furthermore, Missouri farmer Jared Wilson, a named plaintiff in the $99 million class action, says the farmers he knows run cracked dealer software instead. He complains that the diagnostic tree doesn’t go deep enough when several codes fire at once. Europe Launched a Satellite That Reads the Glow Off Plants The European Space Agency posted an explainer for its FLEX mission, then launched it the following night. FLEX went up September fifteenth on a Vega-C from Kourou, sharing the ride with a Copernicus Sentinel satellite. Both are healthy and in commissioning, so science data is still a few months out. Here is what makes it clever. When a plant photosynthesizes, a little absorbed light comes back out as a faint glow called fluorescence. Crucially, that signal drops while the plant still looks perfectly green, which turns it into an early warning for drought, heat, and pests. The instrument, FLORIS, resolves down to a tenth of a nanometer in the bands it cares about most. Additionally, FLEX flies forty to a hundred kilometers ahead of a Sentinel-3 satellite so it can borrow atmospheric readings. ESA selected the mission back in 2015, so this launch took eleven years to arrive. Nunavut Is Already Turning Red NASA published a companion piece using Landsat 9 imagery of the Coppermine River valley in Nunavut. The September sixth shot shows red, orange, and yellow already sweeping the tundra, paired against

    The Ebola Query

  7. Sep 13 ·  Video

    Apple's September Event: iPhone Duo, Apple Watch Series 12, and AirPods 5

    In this episode, Ray Cochrane devotes the whole show to Apple’s fall event, the first under new CEO John Ternus. He starts with the iPhone Duo, Apple’s first foldable iPhone. From there, he covers the Apple Watch Series 12, the new Health Age score, the Apple Watch Ultra 4, and AirPods 5 with noise canceling at $129. – Want to start a podcast? Its easy to get started! Sign-up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens from his father’s studio in Michigan, fresh off a trip to Saugatuck Dunes State Park. Lake Michigan stunned him because it looked like the ocean. He had hoped to spot Wisconsin across the water. However, overcast skies and fog hid the far shore. He also apologizes for the hum in the previous episode, his first video session in the studio. Without headphones on, he took the noise for ordinary background sound. The culprit turned out to be a line-level cable plugged in at one end and loose at the other. After tracing it, he rewired the whole desk so every cable is neat and out of harm’s way. Meanwhile, he is still learning the studio’s TriCaster switcher and working on keeping his eyes on the camera. He invites listeners to send suggestions. Additionally, his grandmother had trouble finding the video version on the site. As a result, a site update is coming that uses the alternate enclosure feature, so listeners can switch between video and audio. Time with his grandmother has been a highlight of the trip. Cochrane reflects on how little time he spent with this side of the family after his father moved to Michigan. Next, he flies home to Oregon after some time in Detroit. As the move comes together, he also wants a better way to get recordings off the TriCaster than a USB drive. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. iPhone Duo: Apple’s First Foldable Arrives Seven Years After Samsung Instead of a spread of headlines, the whole episode covers Apple’s fall event, much like Chris’s recent D23 episode. The event streamed Wednesday as a pre-recorded film. It was also the first event under CEO John Ternus. He took over from Tim Cook, who became executive chairman, on September 1st. It took Apple seven years to answer Samsung’s first Galaxy Fold. Even so, the price barely moved, since the Duo starts at $1,999. Cochrane admits he hoped for something closer to $1,400. Still, based on the marketing alone, the Duo is the upgrade he is most excited about. The Duo is a book-style foldable that opens along a vertical hinge. Closed, it has a 5.4-inch outer screen and is roughly the size of a passport. Open, it reveals a 7.6-inch display, the largest Apple has put on an iPhone. Both screens share the same proportions, so apps simply scale up to fill the bigger screen. Opened flat, the Duo is just 5.2 millimeters thick, which makes it the thinnest iPhone Apple has built. Closed, it measures 11.3 millimeters and weighs 254 grams. By comparison, Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold8 is lighter and thinner at 201 grams and 4.5 millimeters open. The Crease, the Hinge and the Return of Touch ID The crease was Cochrane’s biggest worry, since it is the most common complaint about folding phones. Apple layers the inner screen with a flexible plastic cover, thin glass, and a titanium plate underneath. Custom adhesives let those layers slide as the phone bends. On top, a microscopically etched matte finish scatters reflections to hide the crease. However, Apple only claims the crease is harder to see, not gone. Early hands-on reports split down the middle. Chance Miller at 9to5Mac found it “hard to notice a crease at most angles.” In contrast, Andrew Romero at 9to5Google, working from early videos, said it looks “just as visible” as on Samsung’s Fold8. The hinge uses more than a hundred parts and a row of magnets to hold the phone shut. Cochrane says it snaps open cleanly, which a $2,000 phone should. Notably, the Duo carries an IP68 rating, surviving six meters of water for up to 30 minutes. That matters on a foldable, because dust in the hinge is a classic way these phones die. The Duo also has no Face ID. Instead, a Touch ID fingerprint reader sits in the side button and works open or closed. Cochrane offers his own theory for the switch. With AI now able to generate convincing faces and video, a fingerprint may simply be the safer biometric. Inside the Duo: Chip, Cameras, Software and Battery The Duo runs the A20 Pro, the same chip as the iPhone 18 Pro, built on a two-nanometer process. A vapor chamber carries heat away so the phone can hold full speed longer. Cochrane welcomes that, since his own phone runs hot while charging or running demanding apps. Two 48-megapixel cameras sit on the back, a main and an ultra-wide. The outer screen unlocks the new tricks. For example, you can shoot selfies with the rear cameras, and Duo Preview lets your subjects see the shot. Smart Take snaps the photo when everyone is posing, and Kid Cue plays Peanuts animations to get kids to look at the camera. On the software side, the Duo ships with iOS 27.1. The Dynamic Island now runs vertically along the side, and Split View puts two apps side by side for the first time on an iPhone. Netflix, Zoom and Slack already support it. The Duo carries two batteries, one in each half, and Apple rates it for up to 24 hours of typical use. Charging to 50 percent takes about 20 minutes with a 60-watt adapter. However, that adapter is sold separately, which Cochrane calls out as a raw deal for first-time buyers. MagSafe and Qi2 wireless charging run at up to 25 watts. Storage starts at 256GB for $1,999 and climbs to $3,199 for 2TB. Preorders open October 16th, and the Duo reaches stores October 23rd. Ternus called it “the most transformational change to iPhone since the original.” Cochrane still wants one, though the price gives him pause, and he asks listeners whether they plan to buy. Apple Watch Series 12 Checks Your Heart Every Five Seconds Next, Cochrane turns to the Apple Watch Series 12 and its new Health Sensing System. The watch reads your pulse by shining green light into your skin and measuring what bounces back. After wrestling with the technical term, photoplethysmography, he notes that everyone sensibly calls it the optical sensor. Apple made those lights bigger and more efficient. As a result, the watch now checks your heart rate every five seconds, all day. It also measures heart rate variability, the tiny wobble between beats, as often as every five minutes. A bigger wobble generally means your body is rested and recovered. Cochrane loved Apple’s swimming ad, where a swimmer finishes his swim and checks his heart rate. To him, it feels far more futuristic than the rugged adventure watches of twenty years ago. Swim tracking itself isn’t new. What changed is the constant background check and a live heart rate readout on the watch face. All of that feeds a new daily readiness score from zero to ten. It weighs your recent activity, training load, vitals and sleep, then updates through the day. Engadget points out that competitors already offer readiness scores and faster sampling. In Cochrane’s view, Apple is catching up to the market, but doing it in a big way. Apple’s Heart Rate Accuracy Study Apple claims no wearable reads heart rate more accurately, and this time it published the study. Testers wore a Series 12 on one wrist and a rival on the other, with a Polar H10 chest strap as the reference. The rivals came from Garmin, Google, Huawei, Samsung, WHOOP and Oura. Across 1,254 people at five sites, Apple led in 139 of 159 comparisons. Eighteen were too close to call. The only two losses went to Google’s Pixel Watch 4 at rest, by less than half a beat per minute. Cochrane appreciated that a fifth of participants had the darkest skin tones, where optical sensors have historically struggled. The Series 12 comes in 42- and 46-millimeter sizes, including a new ceramic version. Battery life holds at 24 hours, and fifteen minutes of charging now buys up to twelve hours. Pricing starts at $399 for aluminum, $699 for titanium and $899 for ceramic. It reaches stores September 18th. Health Age and Apple’s Rebuilt Health App Cochrane admits he first misread this feature, and he is glad his initial read turned out wrong. Apple is rebuilding the Health app around Apple Intelligence, its umbrella name for its AI features. The app adds an Insights tab, a For You section, and a Longevity tab covering seven areas of health. Sumbul Desai, a physician who runs health and fitness at Apple, framed the goal. She said pairing the watch’s sensors with Apple Intelligence lets Apple “translate complex biometric data into clear guidance for users.” In other words, nobody wants to scroll through a spreadsheet of their own heartbeats. Inside the Longevity tab sits Health Age. It weighs your VO2 max, resting heart rate, sleep, and heart rate variability against your real age. You can also add lab results like A1c and LDL cholesterol. Apple’s sample screen shows a body running 3.9 years younger than its birthday. Cochrane finds the feature interesting, and he hopes the data stays private, much like health records at a hospital. However, Apple didn’t share the math behind Health Age. He would like Apple to publish its formula, because people will take a number like that seriously. The new app also adds at-home movement evaluations using the iPhone camera and the watch. Users can book a $119 blood panel covering more than 50 biomarkers at roughly 2,000 Quest Diagnostics locations. Cycle Tr

    Apple's September Event: iPhone Duo, Apple Watch Series 12, and AirPods 5

  8. Sep 8 ·  Video

    Anthropic's $5 Million Push to Measure AI's Effect on Wellbeing

    In this episode, Ray Cochrane records from the Michigan studio on the one year anniversary of losing the show’s original host, Todd Cochrane. The featured story is Anthropic’s $5 million grant program, which pays outside researchers to measure whether AI is actually good for the people using it. Ray also covers Anthropic’s Enterprise Frontier Safeguards, Google’s Fairwind cyber defense program, Meta’s organizational second brain, sixteen green AI projects across Asia-Pacific, an Oklahoma Bitcoin mine condemned after leaking 3.8 million gallons of water, BepiColombo closing in on Mercury, and the 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes. – Want to start a podcast? Its easy to get started! Sign-up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens from the studio in Michigan, recording on the one year anniversary of the show losing its original host, Todd Cochrane, his father. The family has gathered for the occasion. He also plans to record several episodes throughout the week as a commemorative run, so listeners should expect a heavier release schedule than usual. He also shares where things stand. He and Delaney have gone back and forth on relocating to Michigan, but the family is pushing, and the plan is firming up for the coming month or so. Part of the draw is getting his dad’s studio cleaned up and running the way it used to. Finally, he passes along an update on the Zuvers, a story long-time listeners will recognize. The father of the three children is due out of jail soon, though he now faces retrial for the murder of the three boys. Cochrane notes that the original prison term related to their return rather than the murders themselves. The family’s expectation, he says, is that this time the sentence will be permanent. Anthropic Puts $5 Million Behind Measuring AI’s Effect on You The featured story asks a question the industry has mostly avoided. Not whether a model is smart, but whether you are better off after using it. Anthropic is funding independent research to find out, and the structure is the interesting part. The money creates what the field calls evaluations: standardized tests for AI models. Hundreds already exist for coding, math, and reasoning. However, almost none measure whether the tool is good for the human on the other end. Crucially, Anthropic is not building these tests in-house. Grantees receive funding, model access and technical support, then work fully independently. Everything they produce must be published open source, so any developer at any company can run it. As Cochrane puts it, Anthropic is paying to create a ruler other people will use to measure Anthropic. The example Anthropic leads with is deliberately uncomfortable. Claude might offer diet and workout advice to someone asking about weight loss. But if that user has a history of disordered eating, the same response becomes actively harmful. Cochrane connects this to sycophancy, a topic the show has returned to before, and notes that models carry no real memory of who you are unless you tell them. That is exactly why the problem has gone unmeasured. Code compiles or it doesn’t. Math checks out or it doesn’t. Wellbeing has no answer key, because the identical response can help one person and harm the next. The Five Things Anthropic Wants These Tests to Do Cochrane walks through all five criteria, since each targets a specific way this research usually fails. First, state plainly what you are measuring. It is easy to measure something adjacent, such as how often a model uses warm language, then publish numbers about a proxy while claiming insight into loneliness itself. Second, involve clinicians and subject-matter experts in designing and validating the tests. A capable engineer may simply not know what the warning signs of an eating disorder look like in text. Without those people in the room, the test measures what engineers imagine the harm looks like. Third, count overcompliance and overrefusal as harms. Overcompliance is the obvious failure. Overrefusal is the model becoming so cautious it turns useless, or shutting down someone who had nowhere else to ask. Cochrane adds that overrefusal is far harder to spot, because you often cannot tell it is degrading until it has degraded. Fourth, reflect real multi-turn usage. Most safety testing throws one nasty question at a model and checks for refusal. Meanwhile, actual harm builds across a long conversation where every individual message reads as fine. Fifth, validate the automated graders against real experts. Scoring thousands of conversations means an AI grades the AI. Consequently, a subtly wrong grader skews every downstream number in the same direction, and nothing in the process flags it. Cochrane expects this to be the hardest criterion to satisfy, since psychiatric and medical specialists do not come cheap by the hour. Applications close September 21st, and shortlisted applicants will be notified by October 5th. Notably, the announcement names no individual researcher or executive. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. Anthropic’s Enterprise Frontier Safeguards Keep Your Logs in Your Vault Anthropic’s second announcement targets a completely different audience. Catching misuse across many sessions requires keeping logs. However, banks and hospitals cannot hand that data to an outside vendor, because regulators will not allow it. Safety monitoring and compliance were in direct conflict. The fix moves where the data lives. Activity logs go into the customer’s own cloud bucket at Amazon, Microsoft or Google, locked with keys the customer controls. Automated systems scan a rolling window for serious abuse such as credential theft, and alerts route straight to the customer’s own security team. No human at Anthropic reads it, and Anthropic does not charge for the feature. The backstory explains the urgency. Anthropic had begun retaining thirty days of data with its Fable 5 model, specifically to catch patterns that only appear across multiple sessions. Regulated customers had to walk away immediately. Over a hundred organizations helped shape the result, including a quarter of the Fortune 100 and every US globally systemically important bank. It works across Claude Code, Claude Enterprise, Amazon Bedrock, and Microsoft Foundry. Wells Fargo’s security team put it simply, saying their logs stay in a Wells-managed environment under Wells-managed keys. Cochrane adds a personal note on the same retention change. Because transcripts now persist thirty days after last touch, he can keep Claude Code threads open far longer and lean on clear without losing context. Google’s Fairwind Program Hands Patching to the Machines Google is running the same play from the defensive side. Normally, a human engineer must reproduce a security flaw, understand it, write a fix, then prove the fix broke nothing else. That can stretch to weeks, and attackers live in exactly that gap. Fairwind pairs two systems to close it. Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber is a model tuned for security work. CodeMender hunts for flaws and writes the patches. Together, Google says they produce verified, deployment-ready patches in minutes, running inside the customer’s own environment. Access is deliberately restricted to three groups: national cyber authorities; critical infrastructure operators in healthcare, telecom, energy, and finance; and major technology platform providers. More than 650 partners are involved. Cochrane’s take centers on logging quality. Systems that emit specific, unique errors rather than generic ones let these tools find real issues almost immediately. Furthermore, he sees value in purpose-tuned models over general ones, since different training data and methodology surface gaps a single familiar model would miss. Meta Built an AI That Learns From Its Own Experts Every organization has two or three people who actually understand the hard systems. When they are busy, everyone waits. When they leave, the knowledge leaves too. Most AI assistants address this with retrieval, searching documents when you ask. Meta went the other way. A long-running offline process digests the source material ahead of time into more than 200 structured knowledge files, so the thinking happens before anyone asks. On top sit what Meta calls recipes, step-by-step procedures mirroring how a specialist actually works a problem. The reported numbers are concrete. Restructuring cut tokens consumed per turn by 80 percent. Assessments that took days now take minutes. The team built the whole system in six weeks across three sprints. Cochrane focuses on the feedback loop. Normally, an expert corrects an assistant in chat; the answer improves once, then the system forgets. Meta’s version compiles corrections into knowledge files and regression-tests them, so fixes stick without retraining the model. However, he raises two real caveats from his own attempts. Building those knowledge files is token-heavy, and codebases change. If the offline process does not rerun, the documentation drifts away from the code it describes. He also predicts this will become a service offered by AWS, GitHub, or GitLab rather than something each company builds alone. Sixteen Green AI Projects Across Asia-Pacific Google DeepMind named the first cohort of its Accelerator: AI for the Planet program. Sixteen organizations span New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Australia and Japan, receiving three months of access to Google’s AI stack plus mentorship and a Singapore bootcamp.

    Anthropic's $5 Million Push to Measure AI's Effect on Wellbeing
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About

Twice weekly Technology News show covering the Tech Space. With Segments on Science, Mobile, Digital TV, FAA, FCC, Cyber Security, Gadgets and Tech Politics.

Information

  • Creator
    Todd Cochrane
  • Years Active
    2005 - 2026
  • Episodes
    40
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 716264 Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
  • Show Website
    Geek News Central Podcast

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