Geek News Central Podcast

In this episode, Ray Cochrane leads with Nvidia’s board investigating reports that Chinese intelligence targeted CEO Jensen Huang. The same day, Huang told employees he had been unfaithful to his wife. Additionally, he covers the Justice Department’s Super Intelligence Task Force and the fake job interview behind Binance’s $6.3 billion crypto Heist. He also gets to a Sega hack that darkened arcades across Japan and the fall of NASA’s Swift telescope. – 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 a quiet personal update. He had a relaxing weekend, spending Friday and Saturday night with Grandma and Delaney. They went out to dinner together and just hung out. In his free time, Cochrane is building a new podcasting tool in Rust. So far, the recording API works, along with some diagnostics and debugging tools. After so much time in PHP, he calls it a breath of fresh air. On the audio side, he noticed the mic was still picking up some feedback last episode. He hasn’t rewired the studio yet, and he isn’t sure which device causes the static. Meanwhile, he is adjusting settings and slowly working through the knobs while keeping the voice quality up. Nvidia’s Board Investigates Its CEO The lead story comes from CBS News. On November 8, it reported that Nvidia’s board opened an investigation involving its own CEO. Nvidia designs the chips that much of the AI industry runs on. The board says it is examining news reports that co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang “has been the target of a foreign intelligence effort.” The same day, Huang sent employees a letter, which Nvidia posted on its news site. In it, he admitted he was unfaithful to his wife and apologized. The letter names no one. Its only nod to the spy reports points to the board’s independent investigation, which Huang says he supports. Independent directors, board members who aren’t company executives, will lead that investigation with outside counsel. So nobody who reports to Huang is running it, which Cochrane counts as good news. The board adds that it has “no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised.” Huang stays on as CEO. From what Cochrane has heard, most people like working under him, so he finds the news tragic. How the Story Broke The story broke on October 29 in The New York Times. The paper reported that a businesswoman named Alice Huang had grown close to Jensen Huang. According to the Times, US intelligence officials had concluded she was passing information to Beijing. Despite the shared last name, the two aren’t related. The Times described her as an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore company that buys Nvidia chips. It also said President Trump was briefed about a year before the story ran and “chose not to do anything with the information.” Later, TechCrunch, citing the Times, reported on a US government memo from earlier in 2026. According to that memo, China’s Ministry of State Security, its main spy agency, recruited her to watch Jensen Huang. On November 6, the Financial Times reported that the same memo describes the relationship as romantic. Then the San Francisco Standard, also citing the Times, reported that Huang named Alice Huang to the board as the other person in the relationship. To Cochrane, Huang seems to be trying to be as transparent as possible. However, no charges have been reported against Alice Huang, and she hasn’t commented. The spy claim rests on unnamed people the Times says were briefed on the surveillance. Meanwhile, China’s foreign ministry called the reports “baseless and purely slanderous smears against China,” which Cochrane calls the response you’d expect. Nvidia, for its part, told ABC News that Huang’s interactions with her were “not unusual or unexpected.” In October, Huang also told Bloomberg News his contact with her was “related to Megaspeed, and it was all completely normal and not unusual.” Megaspeed and the Chip Diversion Worry Megaspeed runs data centers full of Nvidia hardware, and customers pay to use that computing for AI work. According to the Times, its Nvidia chip purchases topped $4.8 billion over about two years. CBS News counts it among Nvidia’s largest customers in Southeast Asia. US officials have looked into Megaspeed since 2024. It started when a Commerce Department official noticed Nvidia equipment at a Malaysian data center that had never been unpacked. Then, in October 2025, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas called for a Commerce Department investigation of the company. The suspicion is chip diversion. Export controls are the US rules on which technology can leave the country and who may buy it. Under them, Nvidia’s most powerful chips can’t legally be sold into China. In a diversion, chips go to an approved buyer in another country, then move on to a barred one. Cochrane can see why China might try it, since it wants the best chips available. In an unrelated case, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles charged a California man on October 1 with smuggling more than $300 million in export-controlled servers to China. He hasn’t been convicted. Chips can also serve Chinese customers without ever entering China. As Forbes describes Cotton’s concern, Nvidia chips sat in Malaysia and Indonesia while Chinese customers used them from a distance. Investigators also suspect Megaspeed was a route for some chips into China itself. Megaspeed hasn’t been charged with anything, and it says it hired outside counsel for an internal investigation. Nvidia told CNBC that “the diversion allegations against this regional cloud were thoroughly investigated and debunked last year.” Still, the Times reports the US investigation moved to the Justice Department in 2026. The H200 and China In January, the US began allowing one older high-end Nvidia chip, the H200, to be sold to approved Chinese buyers. CNBC reported the US government takes 25 percent of those sales, while newer chips stay barred. Even so, Chinese regulators have kept the H200 out. An Nvidia spokesperson told CNBC that China’s government “blocked U.S. AI chips, protecting its own industry.” Cochrane finds that an interesting approach. Still, he suspects China would study the chips it already has to compare techniques. Huang has argued for selling more to China, and CNBC reported he is close to Trump. According to the Times, he met Trump in April 2025 to argue against the ban. Officials had two worries, the Times reported: what could leak out of Nvidia, and how much access Huang had to the president. When US officials believe a foreign spy service is targeting an American, they can warn that person in a private briefing. Yet the Times reported in October that Huang never got that warning, which Cochrane finds interesting. Congress Wants Answers On November 4, three Republican House committee chairmen asked Huang to a closed-door briefing on November 18. Their committees cover foreign affairs, intelligence, and China. The briefing is a private, voluntary meeting with lawmakers. Over the weekend, Democratic Senator Chris Coons of Delaware said, “Congress will investigate and get answers.” The briefing lands one day after Nvidia reports quarterly earnings on November 17. As of November 8, the company hadn’t said whether Huang would attend. Additionally, the board hasn’t named its committee members, its outside counsel, or a timeline. Cochrane calls it a big story out of Nvidia, and a sad one. People get caught doing the stupidest things, he says, and this is one of them. 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. The Justice Department’s Super Intelligence Task Force The headlines open with a story Cochrane found a little wild. On November 5, the Justice Department announced its new Super Intelligence Task Force. The name traces to a September 29 executive order. It tells federal agencies to write “super intelligence” where they used to write “artificial intelligence,” as far as the law allows. So AI becomes SI, though Cochrane jokes that many might agree it isn’t very super. The order defines SI as the same technology federal law already calls AI. Agencies don’t have to change earlier regulations or contracts. Meanwhile, the president’s science advisor owes him draft language for a new legal definition by November 28, and only Congress can make it law. That same September day, Trump and six tech leaders signed a voluntary pledge called the White House Accord on Super Intelligence. According to CNBC, one of them was Jensen Huang, from the lead story. Attorney General Todd Blanche created the task force in an October 13 memo. Its targets include fraud by people and companies, international crime rings, and foreign governments, along with the groups they back. It coordinates cases from existing offices. It also takes over a unit from January that challenged state AI laws in court, The Next Web reported. There’s no word yet on staffing or cost. Tech Times also noted that prosecutors still need laws that existed before September 29. Meanwhile, PolitiFact, writing on Poynter, checked what the word means inside the AI industry. It wrote, “Superintelligence is AI that exceeds human cognition in nearly all fields, something the industry generally agrees no system has achieved.” Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said: “Changing what we call artificial intelligence does nothing to address the very real risks that come with increasingly powerful AI systems.” Cochrane calls it a loaded change that may not even go through, and he plan

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. With Gateway, an infrastructure team sets the rules once, and up to 25 apps can share one l

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 [email protected] 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.

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 handles the Duo’s titanium from melt to rolled sheet, and Apple says at least 80 percent of it is rec

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.