From "gainfully employed robots" to AI that accidentally ruins lives, this week's conversation unpacks the real-world fallout of futuristic promises. Leo, JPT, Iain, and Richard tackle energy sources, social media effects, tech layoffs, and the algorithms quietly taking charge.

• Meta is planning sweeping layoffs as AI costs mount
• Meta Said to Push Back Launch of Avocado Model
• Social media addiction trial: the plaintiff, Meta, and YouTube make closing arguments; jurors begin deliberations Friday on liability for harm to children
• Trump administration will reportedly get $10 billion for brokering the TikTok deal
• Bluesky CEO Jay Graber will step aside
• Digg's open beta shuts down after just two months, blaming AI bot spam
• X says it suspended 800 million accounts in 2024 over spam and manipulation
• Fake AI Content About the Iran War Is All Over X
• Musk admits xAI 'not built right' — weeks after Tesla invested $2 billion
• Nvidia Is Planning to Launch an Open-Source AI Agent Platform
• Amazon Wins Court Order To Block Perplexity's AI Shopping Bots
• Social Security watchdog investigating claims that DOGE engineer copied its databases
• DOGE Deposition Videos Taken Down After Judge Order and Widespread Mockery
• U.S. State Bans on Lab-Grown Meats Challenged in Court
• Easy-to-use solar panels are coming, but utilities are trying to delay them
• EcoFlow brings its plug-in solar power plant to US homes (related to the plug-in solar story)
• TerraPower gets permit to build reactor
• Ex-Uber CEO Kalanick Debuts Plan for 'Gainfully Employed Robots'
• Tennessee grandmother jailed after AI facial recognition error links her to fraud
• Justice Department and Live Nation Reach Settlement Terms in Antitrust Case
• Palantir CEO Makes Shocking Confession on Disrupting Democratic Power
• Palantir's lethal AI weaponry deployed to find chairs for US government staff
• How Pokémon Go is giving delivery robots an inch-perfect view of the world
• 'Flying Cars' Will Take Off in American Skies This Summer
• YouTube surpasses Disney, Paramount, WBD in 2025 ad revenue
• Ig Nobel Prize flees US for Switzerland after 35 years over safety concerns
• Swiss e-voting can't count 2,048 ballots after USB keys fail to decrypt them
• Tony Hoare, Turing Award-Winning Computer Scientist Behind QuickSort, Dies At 92

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Iain Thomson, Richard Campbell, and Jennifer Pattison Tuohy

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Between copyright-free AI art, government blacklists, and data brokers run amok, this episode spotlights the fierce new battles for privacy, agency, and control in our digital lives. Plus, hear Cory Doctorow break down why the AI gold rush may be headed for a colossal crash.

• Pentagon Officially Tells Anthropic It Is a Supply Chain Risk
• Trump moves to blacklist Anthropic AI from all government work
• If AI is a weapon, why don't we regulate it like one?
• Sam Altman's greed and dishonesty are finally catching up to him
• ChatGPT user base surges 350% in 18 months as it nears 1 billion weekly active users
• AI-generated art can't be copyrighted after the Supreme Court declines to review the rule
• Chardet dispute shows how AI will kill software licensing, argues Bruce Perens
• Grammarly is using our identities without permission
• Alphabet Grants Sundar Pichai Stock Awards Worth Up to $686 Million
• Google vs Epic Games ends with Android app stores, lower fees
• Google Ends Its 30% App Store Fee, Welcomes Third-Party App Stores - Slashdot
• Xbox CEO confirms next-gen 'Project Helix' console will play PC games
• Motorola Partners With GrapheneOS - Slashdot
• Data Broker Breaches Fueled Nearly $21 Billion in Identity-Theft Losses
• CBP Tapped Into the Online Advertising Ecosystem To Track Peoples' Movements
• Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous 'Stop Cop City' Protester
• COPPA 2.0 passes the Senate again, unanimously this time
• South Korean Police Lose Seized Crypto By Posting Password Online
• Iranian drone strikes at Amazon sites raise alarms over protecting data centers
• Charter Gets FCC Permission To Buy Cox, Become Largest ISP In the US
• How Big Diaper absorbs billions of extra dollars from American parents
• Anne Wojcicki's Plan to Revive 23andMe: Rich Donors, Improved Tests—and Maybe Even MAHA
• Bundle of human neurons hooked to silicon learns to stumble through Doom
• 10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips
• Seagate Just Unleashed 44TB Hard Drives

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Joey de Villa and Cory Doctorow

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Anthropic's clash with the Pentagon pits tech ethics against government demands, raising explosive questions about AI's role in surveillance and weaponry. If you care about who controls the future of artificial intelligence, this episode is a must-listen.

• Sam Altman says OpenAI shares Anthropic's red lines in Pentagon fight
• The whole thing was a scam
• OpenAI allows NSA to use GPT for surveilling Americans
• Anthropic's Claude hits No. 1 on Apple's top free apps list after Pentagon rejection
• Layoffs at Block
• Crypto exchange Gemini plans to lay off up to 200 staff, exit Europe, and Australia
• Netflix Backs Out of Bid for Warner Bros., Paving Way for Paramount Takeover
• An update on our model deprecation commitments for Claude Opus 3 \ Anthropic
• Keep Android Open
• Colorado moves age checks from websites to operating systems | Biometric Update
• Open source calculator firmware DB48X forbids CA/CO use due to age verification
• New Apple product launch starts Monday, Tim Cook confirms
• Everything announced at Samsung Unpacked: The Galaxy S26 Ultra, Galaxy Buds 4 and more
• Here's how the new Samsung Galaxy S26 compares with last year's S25
• Hacked Prayer App Sends 'Surrender' Messages to Iranians Amid Israeli and US Strikes
• The Big One: The cyberattack scenarios that keep officials up at night
• CISA replaces acting director after a bumbling year on the job
• New AirSnitch attack bypasses Wi-Fi encryption in homes, offices, and enterprises
• Victory! Tenth Circuit Finds Fourth Amendment Doesn't Support Broad Search of Protesters' Devices and Digital Data
• Enthusiasts used their home computers to search for ET—scientists are homing in on 100 signals they found
• Americans now listen to podcasts more often than talk radio, study shows | TechCrunch
• Burger King Will Use AI To Check If Employees Say 'Please' and 'Thank You'
• Uber Previews Its Dubai Air Taxi Service - Slashdot
• Rob Grant, creator of Red Dwarf, has died
• Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, Song of Kali, dead at 77

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Molly White, Owen Thomas, and Harry McCracken

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What do jailbreaking fighter jets, lost Amazon vans, and swapping your phone's smart features for a handful of mud have in common? TWiT dives into the wild, occasionally absurd future of tech, where yesterday's sci-fi is tomorrow's supply-chain headache.

• Mark Zuckerberg and his Ray-Ban entourage have their day in court
• Instagram Boss Says 16 Hours of Daily Use Is Not Addiction
• Meta Begins $65 Million Election Push To Advance AI Agenda - Slashdot
• Australia's Social Media Ban Is Isolating Kids With Disabilities—Just Like Critics Warned
• Google I/O 2026 set for May 19-20
• Pixel 10A hands-on: More like a slightly better Pixel 9A than a slightly worse Pixel 10
• Google announces Gemini 3.1 Pro, says it's better at complex problem-solving
• Tucson Daily Brief
• Leaked Email Suggests Ring Plans to Expand 'Search Party' Surveillance Beyond Dogs
• A $10K+ bounty is waiting for anyone who can unplug Ring doorbells from Amazon’s cloud
• Amazon delivery van accidentally gets stuck in the sea in Britain
• Tesla 'Robotaxi' adds 5 more crashes in Austin in a month – 4x worse than humans
• Government Docs Reveal New Details About Tesla and Waymo Robotaxis' Human Babysitters
• The Supreme Court's Tariff Ruling Won't Bring Car Prices Back to Earth
• A flood of cheap used EVs is coming
• Signal guide for everyday folks
• PayPal discloses data breach that exposed user info for 6 months
• Federal ban on TP-Link routers shelved, but Texas fights on
• You probably can't trust your password manager if it's compromised
• Mississippi health system shuts down clinics statewide after ransomware attack
• Fake Job Recruiters Hid Malware In Developer Coding Challenges
• F-35 Software Could Be Jailbreaked Like an IPhone: Dutch Defense Minister - Slashdot
• In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud — 'The mud should sound perfectly awful, but it doesn't,' notes the experiment creator | Tom's Hardware
• Lab-Grown Meat Exists (But Nobody Wants To Eat It)
• CERN rebuilt the original browser from 1989

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Sam Abuelsamid, Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ, and Nicholas De Leon

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Is social media addictive by design or just irresistible entertainment? The panel tackles the lawsuit that's dragging tech giants onto the witness stand and how surveillance tech is quietly expanding while lawmakers and users scramble to catch up.

• Jury told that Meta, Google 'engineered addiction' at landmark US trial
• Instagram Chief Says Social Media Is Not 'Clinically Addictive' in Landmark Trial
• Section 230 turns 30 as it faces its biggest tests yet
• Meta apparently thinks we're too distracted to care about facial recognition and Ray-Bans
• Amazon Ring's Super Bowl ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance
• Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash
• TikTok is tracking you, even if you don't use the app.
• Discord backtracks on controversial age verification rollout...kind of
• Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass
• The DJI Romo robovac had security so poor that this man remotely accessed thousands of them
• HP's laptop subscriptions are a great deal — for HP
• FTC Ratchets Up Microsoft Probe, Queries Rivals on Cloud, AI
• T-Mobile announces its network is now full of AI by rolling out real-time translation
• Apple's latest attempt to launch the new Siri runs into snags
• SpaceX Prioritizes Lunar 'Self-Growing City' Over Mars Project, Musk Says
• Elon Musk declares victory with Medicaid data release
• Waymo Is Getting DoorDashers to Close Doors on Self Driving Cars
• Backblaze Drive Stats for 2025
• $1.8 million MST3K Kickstarter brings in (almost) everyone from the old show
• OpenAI Is Nuking Its 4o Model. China's ChatGPT Fans Aren't OK
• Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died
• Byte magazine artist Robert Tinney, who illustrated the birth of PCs, dies at 78
• Launching The Rural Guaranteed Minimum Income Initiative

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Wesley Faulkner, Stacey Higginbotham, and Thomas Germain

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Will Elon Musk really launch a million data centers into orbit, and why is McDonald's so worried about you using "McNuggets" as your password? This week's tech roundtable takes on wild new frontiers and everyday security headaches with insight and a bit of irreverence.

• More schools are banning phones so students can focus. Ohio's results show it's not that simple
• After Australia, Which Countries Could Be Next to Ban Social Media for Children
• EU says TikTok must disable 'addictive' features like infinite scroll, fix its recommendation engine
• Anthropic and OpenAI release dueling AI models on the same day in an escalating rivalry
• Sam Altman says Anthropic's Super Bowl spot is 'dishonest' about ChatGPT ads, but he agrees it's funny
• Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 uncovers 500 zero-day flaws in open-source code
• Alphabet reports Q4 2025 revenue of $113.8 billion
• Amazon's blowout $200 billion AI spending plan stuns Wall Street
• A New Gilded Age: Big Tech goes on a $600 billion AI spending splurge
• Hidden Cameras in Chinese Hotels Are Livestreaming Guests To Thousands of Telegram Subscribers
• AI-generated ads hit the Super Bowl
• SpaceX acquires xAI, plans to launch a massive satellite constellation to power it
• Russia suspected of intercepting EU satellites
• Notepad++ hijacked by state-sponsored actors
• New York Wants to Ctrl+Alt+Delete Your 3D Printer
• Western Digital Plots a Path To 140 TB Hard Drives Using Vertical Lasers and 14-Platter Designs
• A Crisis comes to Wordle: Reusing old words
• The Wayback Machine debuts a new plug-in designed to fix the internet's broken links problem
• Project Hail Mary is getting its own LEGO set
• Dave Farber

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Larry Magid, Mike Elgan, and Louis Maresca

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What happens when AI bots get their own social network, Silicon Valley execs cozy up to power, and Apple takes a cut from creators? This week's panel calls out the bold, bizarre, and often problematic ways tech's biggest players are reshaping everything from AI assistants to your everyday privacy.

• There's a social network for AI agents, and it's getting weird
• Moltbook is the most interesting place on the internet right now
• Exposed Moltbook Database Let Anyone Take Control of Any AI Agent on the Site
• Pentagon clashes with Anthropic over military AI use, sources say
• Salesforce signs $5.6B deal to inject agentic AI into the US Army
• Angry Norfolk residents lose lawsuit to stop Flock license plate scanners
• SpaceX wants to put 1 million solar-powered data centers into orbit
• Elon Musk reportedly wants a June SpaceX IPO to align with his birthday, the planets
• Tesla hits a grim milestone: its second straight year of decline
• Tesla says production-ready Optimus robot is coming soon
• Microsoft reports strong cloud earnings in Q2 as gaming declines
• What We Learned From Meta, Microsoft and Tesla
• Apple tells Patreon to move creators to in-app purchase for subscriptions by November
• Apple CEO Tim Cook 'heartbroken' after repeated ICE killings in Minneapolis
• A rival smart glasses company is suing Meta over its Ray-Ban products
• TikTok, YouTube, and Meta are headed to court for a landmark trial over social media addiction
• The 'Social Media Addiction' Narrative May Be More Harmful Than Social Media Itself
• TikTok users freak out over app's 'immigration status' collection — here's what it means
• A Waymo hit a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica
• Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign
• Samsung's TriFold phone will cost $2,899 in the US
• Groundhogs are bad at predicting weather, but they're valuable animal engineers\
• Satellites encased in wood are in the works
• Belkin reminds users that its Wemo smart home products are shutting down this week

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Gary Rivlin, Devindra Hardawar, and Victoria Song

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Microsoft quietly hands over BitLocker keys to the government, TikTok's new privacy terms spark a user panic, and Europe's secret tech backups reveal anxious prep for digital fallout. Plus, how gambling platforms are changing the future of news and sports.

• You can bet on how much snow will fall in New York City this weekend
• Europe Prepares for a Nightmare Scenario: The U.S. Blocking Access to Tech
• China, US sign off on TikTok US spinoff
• TikTok users freak out over app's 'immigration status' collection -- here's what it means
• Elon Musk's Grok A.I. Chatbot Made Millions of Sexualized Images, New Estimates Show
• Microsoft Gave FBI Keys To Unlock Encrypted Data, Exposing Major Privacy Flaw - Forbes
• House of Lords votes to ban social media for Brits under 16
• Overrun with AI slop, cURL scraps bug bounties to ensure "intact mental health"
• Route leak incident on January 22, 2026
• 149 Million Usernames and Passwords Exposed by Unsecured Database
• Millions of people imperiled through sign-in links sent by SMS
• Anthropic revises Claude's 'Constitution,' and hints at chatbot consciousness
• The new Siri chatbot may run on Google servers, not Apple's
• A Wikipedia Group Made a Guide to Detect AI Writing. Now a Plug-In Uses It to 'Humanize' Chatbots
• GitHub - anthropics/original_performance_takehome: Anthropic's original performance take-home, now open for you to try!
• Telly's "free" ad-based TVs make notable revenue—when they're actually delivered - Ars Technica
• Toilet Maker Toto's Shares Get Unlikely Boost From AI Rush - Slashdot
• Dr. Gladys West, whose mathematical models inspired GPS, dies at 95

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Alex Stamos, Doc Rock, and Patrick Beja

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Claude isn't just the hottest name in AI right now—it's quietly ushering in a wave of ultra-personalized, vibe-coded software that could transform how we build and use tech in 2026. Find out why coders and normies alike are obsessed and what's coming next.

• Claude Cowork Exfiltrates Files
• Behind the Curtain: The AI future has arrived
• Our Algorithmic Grey-Beige World
• Musk wants up to $134B in OpenAI lawsuit, despite $700B fortune
• Elon Musk's Grok 'Undressing' Problem Isn't Fixed
• I asked Grok's AI to undress me after X's new limits. It's still easy on the app.
• Senate passes Defiance Act for a second time to address Grok deepfakes
• Instagram says it fixed the issue that sent password reset emails
• Instagram AI Influencers Are Defaming Celebrities With Sex Scandals
• French Court Orders Popular VPNs to Block More Pirate Sites, Despite Opposition
• Nearly 5 Million Accounts Removed Under Australia's New Social Media Ban
• TikTok has quietly launched a new micro drama app called PineDrama as the category picks up steam in the US
• Creator income inequality is rising as top influencers rake in big paydays from brands
• Managers on alert for "launch fever" as pressure builds for NASA's Moon mission
• Senate passes minibus bill funding NASA, rejecting Trump's proposed cuts
• Pentagon Device Linked To Havana Syndrome
• Zuck#: A programming language for connecting the world. And harvesting it
• Amazon is buying copper harvested by bacteria for its data centers
• 'Are You Dead?' is now the top paid App Store app in China
• Danish dev delights kid by turning floppy drive into easy TV remote
• Cinemark will fill almost anything with popcorn this weekend—but there's a catch
• Happy Birthday, Wikipedia: We need you now more than ever
• Pluralistic: The world needs an Ireland for disenshittification (17 Jan 2026)

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Harper Reed and Abrar Al-Heeti

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Is putting a camera in your toilet the future of health, or have tech companies lost the plot? This episode's panel digs into what's truly innovative versus what's just over the top, as industry leaders spar over privacy concerns and the real impact of AI in everyday devices.

• We tried to get humanoid robots to do the laundry
• Boston Dynamics unveils production-ready version of Atlas robot at CES 2026
• Hair Drying Robot
• Jensen Huang Says Nvidia's New Vera Rubin Chips Are in 'Full Production'
• AMD's Ryzen AI 400 series includes the first Copilot+ desktop CPU — Team Red refreshes Zen 5 APUs and Strix Halo
• Meta's EMG wristband is moving beyond its AR glasses
• Lego's Smart Brick Gives the Iconic Analog Toy a New Digital Brain
• The Alexa Plus website is now available to everyone in early access
• Throne, from the co-founder of Whoop, uses computer vision to study your poop
• The Verge Awards at CES 2026
• These are the smart home gadgets that impressed me at CES 2026

Host: Leo Laporte

Guests: Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, and Jason Hiner

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