Digital Privacy
350 episodes
#6193: Why Email Images Still Phone Home
That "load remote images?" prompt is older than your phone. Here's what fetching a picture actually tells the sender.
#6181: Shipping Private Android Apps to Your Family
Daniel wants to ship private Android apps to non-technical relatives. F-Droid repos, Basic Auth, and the Google verification cloud on the horizon.
#6167: Streaming Browser Cookies to a Headless Server
Daniel wants his logged-in browser on the home server. Chrome bolted the front door — so what's left?
#6104: Mistral AI : le pari européen de la souveraineté en intelligence artificielle
Comment Mistral AI défie la Silicon Valley avec des modèles efficaces, des partenariats stratégiques et son nouveau modèle vocal Voxtral ? Corn et Herman font le point.
#6100: Voting From an Embassy: Israel's 4,860-Voter Election
101 polling stations in 99 missions, 4,860 eligible voters, 30 hours of polls rolling west with the sun.
#6095: How to Prove Your Photo Is Real
Deepfakes made faking easy. Now the harder problem: proving your real photos and video are real. A field guide.
#6068: Chinese AI Models: Refusing vs. Reframing
New studies show Chinese AI models have shifted from refusing sensitive questions to answering them — in the Party's voice.
#6041: How CENO Moves a Web Page Into a Censored Country
A walk through CENO's actual plumbing: signed caches, volunteer bridges, and why the chain is deliberately short.
#5979: Why We Shake Hands: A 2,800-Year History
The handshake wasn't inevitable — it won. From Assyrian treaty reliefs to Quaker radicalism, how one gesture conquered the world.
#5850: Ambient Computing: Why Glasses Beat the Phone
Weiser's 1991 vision said tech should disappear. Thirty-five years later, the device that finally worked wasn't new — it was glasses.
#5818: 46,434 Mailing Lists That Still Work
Daniel wants a public town hall. Turns out the oldest tool on the internet — the mailing list — might be the right one.
#5715: No Phone, No Panic: Safety Without Surveillance
A parent takes a kid out for hours, phone-free. When does check-in become care, and when does it become control?
#5714: The Moon's Junkyard Has a Gift Shop
150 tons of stuff sits on the Moon. Two objects on one square meter tell opposite stories: a $5.50 nylon flag and a silicon disc built for millennia.
#5695: Gut-Brain Drugs: Why Old Antidepressants Help Bloating
A listener with post-cholecystectomy bloating asks why an old antidepressant might help — and whether anything better is coming.
#5629: Keyloggers, Stingrays, and the Library Laptop Grab
Tor, Signal, full-disk encryption — and a chip on the motherboard that none of them can see.
#5601: How Image Forensics Catches Fake Ghosts and Deepfakes
From darkroom magnifying glasses to AI provenance fingerprints — how we've verified photographs for a century.
#5577: When the UN Goes Viral: Pitchers, Shoes, and 6-Second Clips
A six-second clip of a man drinking from a pitcher resurfaces as if it's new — inside the long history of the UN's most meme-able moments.
#5532: What Your Browser Isn't Telling You
DevTools quietly omits what privacy researchers need most. Here's how to actually tap browser traffic — and what shows up when you do.
#5530: Jerusalem's Pencil Line: 1948–1967
Two commanders drew a ceasefire line in wax pencil in 1948. It became a city's border for nineteen years.
#5500: Eight Consulates That Answer to No One
Eight countries keep consulates in Jerusalem that bypass their own Tel Aviv embassies. The reason goes back four centuries.
#5498: Who Was a Superpower Before America?
The word "superpower" was invented in 1944. So how do you build a list of them stretching back to Akkad?
#5495: Musrara: Growing Up on Jerusalem's Pencil-Drawn Border
How a border drawn with wax pencils in 1948 split Musrara's homes in two — and shaped the neighborhood that raised the Israeli Black Panthers.
#5486: Why Hebrew URLs Turn Into Percent-Sign Gibberish
Hebrew renders fine in the domain but explodes into percent-hex in the path. Two different standards explain the split.
#5481: Small Models, Big Guardrails: PII Detection in ChatGPT
A tiny 600M parameter model is quietly scanning your ChatGPT tool calls for PII. Here's how that class of guardian model actually works.