Ursa Ag is an Alberta, Canada-based company that is selling a repairable, no tech tractor. It’s not often we have companies on this podcast, but listeners of the show will know we have been covering the right to repair movement for years. One of the things I’ve written about most is the frustration that farmers feel with agriculture giant John Deere, which has made their tractors very difficult to repair by loading it up with tech, lobbying against right to repair legislation, and making parts and diagnostic tools and repair guides hard to access. When we write about right to repair, people often say - why don’t people just vote with their dollars and buy something else? Well, all the major tractor companies have more or less done the same thing Deere has done - add software locks, sensors, and digital rights management to their tractors. There wasn’t any other alternative. Doug Wilson of Ursa Ag has built an alternative. Ursa Ag is selling a repairable dumb tractor specifically to provide an alternative in the market. We spoke with Doug about how one creates a tractor company, how it all works, and what the response has been.

00:00 Doug Wilson Introduction 00:02:05 Why IRSA Ag Exists 00:04:24 Modern Tractors & Repair Locks 00:07:40 Demand for Older Tractors 00:08:46 The $800K Tractor Story 00:09:37 Building a Repairable Tractor 00:12:56 Precision Ag vs Simplicity 00:20:45 Starting a Tractor Company 00:22:52 AI & Everyday Farm Work 00:27:21 Viral Response & Demand 00:28:52 Expansion Plans 00:31:56 Why Farmers Want Simpler Machines 00:34:11 Farm Consolidation 00:35:48 Tech Overload Beyond Farming 00:36:57 What’s Next

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We start this week with Sam’s deeply reported story on how deepfakes rocked a high school, and how those kids were failed at each step. After the break, Joseph tells us about BusPatrol, a company that plans to turn school buses into roaming surveillance vehicles. In the subscribers-only section, Jason explains why a councilmember crashed out over Flock.

• LA Made x 404 Media Presents: How AI is Threatening the Future of Media
• How Deepfakes Tore a High School Apart
• ‘BusPatrol’ Put AI Cameras in Tens of Thousands of School Buses. Now They Want to Give Cops Access
• After Town Bans Flock, Councilmember Crashes Out, Proposes Internet and Phone Ban

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This week Joseph speaks to Zack Whittaker, an editor at TechCrunch. Zack has been leading coverage into the spouseware or stalkerware industry. This is malware sold to ordinary people, which they then often install on their girlfriend’s or someone else’s phone. Zack talks about the crazy scope of this problem.

• Behind the stalkerware network spilling the private phone data of hundreds of thousands
• Spyzie stalkerware is spying on thousands of Android and iPhone users
• Stalkerware tag on TechCrunch
• This Week In Security Newsletter

YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/BLb46310iLs

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We start this week with Sam telling us all about the commencement speeches where speakers have been praising AI, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. That did not go down well! After the break, Jason tells us how he was offered the chance to buy a bunch of images of poop to train AI (really). In the subscribers-only section, Joseph explains how researchers planned to stick cameras onto preschool teachers to train AI.

• Students Boo Commencement Speaker After She Calls AI the ‘Next Industrial Revolution’
• Internet of Shit: AI Poop Analysis App Offered to Sell Me Database of Its Users' Poops
• Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI

YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/VE0EtqQLcgY

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This week, I’m delighted to be joined by Britt Paris. Britt is a critical informatics scholar and Associate Professor of Library and Information Science at Rutgers University’s School of Communication & Information. Her work focuses on Internet infrastructure, artificial intelligence-generated information objects, digital labor, civic data, and social epistemology. She’s also a fellow with AI Now. Her book Radical Infrastructure: Imagining the Internet from the Ground Up just came out in February. 

Britt tells us about how her great-great-great uncle started a telecommunications cooperative in rural Missouri before the city even had connection, how examples like NEMR show us an alternative to monopolies that provide internet access and let people decide how they want their internet to work for them, and what’s giving her hope as she helps bargain for educators’ rights at Rutgers. 

• Radical Infrastructure: Imagining the Internet from the Ground Up
• The American Association of University Professors on AI
• University Professors Disturbed to Find Their Lectures Chopped Up and Turned Into AI Slop
• Community Votes to Deny Water to Nuclear Weapons Data Center

YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/5twr0EUo2YE

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We start this week with Joseph’s story about how we obtained Haotian AI, a sought-after piece of realtime video deepfake software that lets you turn into anyone else during Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, or Zoom calls. After the break, Matthew tells us about some insane Yu-Gi-Oh trading card drama. In the subscribers-only section, Jason explains how the hard drive shortage is impacting those archiving the internet.

• ‘HELLO BOSS’: Inside the Chinese Realtime Deepfake Software Powering Scams Around the World
• Man Finds $1 Million Worth of Yu-Gi-Oh Cards in a Dumpster
• The AI Hard Drive Shortage Is Making It More Expensive and Harder to Archive the Internet

YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/O_d1VxuBdAU

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The logic behind Polymarket, Kalshi and sports betting apps can be traced back to the inner workings of the slot machine. 

How did we get to a point where it’s legal for anyone to bet on anything? Be it the results of a baseball game or a land war in Europe, if you have access to a credit card and a computer you can try to predict the outcome of anything that’s happening in the world and win a little bit of money if you’re right. If we know that gambling can lead to high rates gambling addiction and financial ruin, why does it seem like our culture has suddenly embraced it?

For years, anyone who has reported on our increasing addiction to technology has found their way to Natasha Natasha Dow Schüll’s book Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. The book is an ethnography of slot machines. It is based on many interviews with the people who make them and play them, a deep investigation of how they work, and how they fit into the larger context of casinos, Las Vegas, and gambling more broadly. 

Since it was published more than a decade ago, the logic of slot machines has extended far beyond Las Vegas. Every notification on our phone, trading platforms like Robinhood, the crypto craze, and now prediction markets, can be understood through the lens of slot machine design and Schüll work. That’s why I was incredibly happy she agreed to come on the podcast this week to discuss our current gambling-obsessed culture. 

https://www.natashadowschull.org

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This week we start with Jason's story about Flock accessing cameras in a children's gymnastics room as a sale pitch demo. After the break, Emanuel tells us why Nature retracted a paper about the alleged benefits of ChatGPT in education. In the subscibers-only section, we talk all about the cancellation of RightsCon after pressure from the Chinese government.

• City Learns Flock Accessed Cameras in Children's Gymnastics Room as a Sales Pitch Demo, Renews Contract Anyway
• 'Nature' Retracts Paper on the Benefits of ChatGPT in Education
• OpenAI, Google, aÍnd Microsoft Back Bill to Fund ‘AI Literacy’ in Schools
• World’s Largest Digital Human Rights Conference Suddenly Canceled
• China Pressure Canceled World’s Largest Digital Human Rights Conference

YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/hLR8MOOhRCo

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This week, we talk to Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine, about a rash of people physically destroying AI and surveillance infrastructure. Brian puts this wave of attacks in the historical context of the Luddites, who are notoriously misunderstood and fought for worker protections against automation during the Industrial Revolution. Over the last few months, we have seen people in San Francisco and Los Angeles torch Waymos, bash delivery robots with baseball bats, destroy Flock cameras, and threaten AI data centers and the politicians championing them. This type of political violence doesn’t and cannot occur in a vacuum, it happens because people feel they are being taken advantage of and that their representatives aren’t listening to them. Given the current state of things, we can likely expect more of these sorts of attacks to occur.

Blood In The Machine

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This week, Jason explains the conspiracy theory circulating behind a trippy stock image that went viral after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner—was it sent here by a time traveler? (Spoiler: It was not.) Then Sam unpacks what’s happening at Arizona State University with a messy rollout of a new AI-powered tool that generates lessons by scraping professors’ lectures without their knowledge. In the second for subscribers at the Supporter level, Emanuel gets philosophical with a discussion about the question of machine consciousness and how it relates to a new paper from a Google-affiliated scientist.

• ⁠University Professors Disturbed to Find Their Lectures Chopped Up and Turned Into AI Slop⁠
• ⁠Did a Time Traveling Superintelligent AI Try to Warn About White House Correspondents Dinner Shooting? An Investigation⁠
• ⁠Google DeepMind Paper Argues LLMs Will Never Be Conscious⁠

YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/VOo0ZpIagP0

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This week Joseph talks to Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, a journalist at TechCrunch. Lorenzo has possibly the deepest understanding of one of the wildest cybersecurity stories in years: how an employee of Trenchant, a government malware vendor that is supposed to only sell to the ‘good’ guys, secretly sold a bunch of hacking tools to a Russian company. Those tools, it looks like, then ended up with the Russian government and possibly Chinese criminals too. It’s a really insane story about how powerful hacking tech can fall into the wrong hands.

• Inside the story of the US defense contractor who leaked hacking tools to Russia

• US military contractor likely built iPhone hacking tools used by Russian spies in Ukraine

Youtube Version: https://youtu.be/MWxLqopMo5o

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