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Geek News Central Podcast

Geek News Central Podcast

Written by: Todd Cochrane
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Twice weekly Technology News show covering the Tech Space. With Segments on Science, Mobile, Digital TV, FAA, FCC, Cyber Security, Gadgets and Tech Politics.716264 Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Politics & Government Science
Episodes
  • A Reversible Glue that could Replace Solder #1865

    A Reversible Glue that could Replace Solder #1865
    May 17 2026
    In this episode, Ray Cochrane breaks down a reversible conductive glue from Newcastle University that could replace solder and finally make electronics recycling work. Additional stories cover China widening its clean energy lead, DeepMind’s AlphaEvolve scoring wins from genomics to Google’s database, Anthropic’s $200 million partnership with the Gates Foundation, Intel teaming up with McLaren Racing, and end-to-end encrypted RCS rolling out in beta. – 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 the show with a deep dive into Newcastle University’s reversible conductive glue, a water-based adhesive that could finally make electronics recycling economically viable. He frames the e-waste problem first: 62 billion kilos a year, with less than a quarter ever recycled. Then he walks through the silver nanoparticle chemistry, the lead-free angle on traditional solder, and the geopolitical stakes of critical mineral recovery. From there the episode pivots through energy, AI, hardware, open source, data research, space, science, and consumer privacy. A Reversible Conductive Glue That Could Replace Solder A team at Newcastle University has developed a water-based glue that conducts electricity well enough to replace solder. Unlike solder, however, the glue releases cleanly with a quick rinse of acetone or an alkaline bath. The breakthrough relies on silver nanoparticles suspended in a water-based binder. Consequently, components can be recovered intact, opening a viable path to electronics recycling at scale. Co-investigator Volker Pickert framed the second prize directly: solder has the best conductivity, but the best formulations contain lead. China Widens Its Clean Energy Lead A new Atlas Public Policy report shows Chinese firms accounted for 55 percent of $1.1 trillion in global clean energy manufacturing investment between 2019 and 2025. Battery manufacturing alone pulled in nearly half of that money. Meanwhile, U.S. companies have actively retreated from those same industries. With the Strait of Hormuz currently closed, supply chain ownership in solar, wind, and batteries matters more than ever. A separate Ember analysis showed Chinese solar panel exports doubled in March alone. DeepMind’s AlphaEvolve Scores Real Wins DeepMind published an update on AlphaEvolve, its Gemini-powered AI coding agent. The system cut genomic variant detection errors by 30 percent. Additionally, it lifted AC Optimal Power Flow feasibility from 14 to over 88 percent on the electrical grid. AlphaEvolve also found a better cache replacement policy in two days that would have taken human engineers months. Furthermore, it reduced write amplification in Google’s Spanner database by 20 percent. The pattern shows applied AI sticking, not as a chatbot but as a quiet optimizer. Anthropic and Gates Foundation Commit $200 Million Anthropic announced a four-year, $200 million partnership with the Gates Foundation across three pillars. The biggest pillar targets global health and life sciences in low and middle-income countries. Notably, the research scope includes polio, HPV, and preeclampsia. A second pillar covers AI in education across the U.S., sub-Saharan Africa, and India, in partnership with the Global AI for Learning Alliance. Finally, an economic mobility pillar focuses on agricultural productivity and crop benchmarks. Google’s AI Educator Series Launches Free Google rolled out the first 20-plus sessions of its AI Educator Series this week. The free AI literacy training targets the roughly 6 million K-12 and higher education teachers across the U.S. Modules are designed as short, snackable trainings teachers can finish in a prep period or a lunch break. Additionally, stackable workshops let educators build credentials over time. Importantly, the program requires no institutional subscription. Amazon Bedrock Prompt Optimization Goes GA Amazon Bedrock dropped its Advanced Prompt Optimization tool, now generally available across most major regions. The feature rewrites prompts to perform better on specific models and automates prompt migration when switching between models. Furthermore, a built-in evaluation feedback loop lets users benchmark against up to five models side by side. The default judge model is Claude Sonnet 4.6. Consequently, teams can stop hand-tuning string templates and focus on product work. 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. Arm AGI CPU and Red Hat Go Production-Ready on Agentic AI Arm and Red Hat expanded their collaboration around Arm’s AGI ...
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    44 mins
  • Mozilla Meets Mythos #1864

    Mozilla Meets Mythos #1864
    May 10 2026
      In this episode, Ray Cochrane leads with Mozilla shipping Firefox 150 with 271 patched bugs found by Anthropic’s Mythos system, the first major real-world deployment of the AlphaGo-Moment cybersecurity tooling. He also covers a 9-year dormant Linux kernel root, a college student stopping Taiwan’s high-speed rail with a software-defined radio, GitHub MCP secret scanning going GA, the NVIDIA NeMo lawsuit surviving its motion to dismiss, the Hugging Face Reachy Mini app store, Anthropic’s Auto Mode for Claude Code, and the 4-gigabyte AI model Chrome silently installed on your computer. – 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 the show with the AlphaGo Moment moving from theory into production. Mozilla shipped Firefox 150 this week with 271 patched bugs that Anthropic’s Mythos system found. Furthermore, the broader episode threads a clear pattern: AI tooling is reshaping security, developer workflows, and consumer software faster than the surrounding ecosystem can absorb it. The show closes on the four-gigabyte AI model Chrome installed on a billion machines without explicit consent. Mozilla Ships 271 Mythos Bugs in Firefox 150 Mozilla ran Anthropic’s restricted Mythos system against the Firefox 150 codebase before shipping. The result: 271 found bugs (180 high severity, 80 moderate, 11 low) baked into the release. However, the bigger number is the year-over-year jump. April 2026 shipped 423 total Firefox security fixes versus 31 a year prior. The breakdown for April: 271 from Mythos, 41 from external researchers, and 111 from other internal sources. Cochrane is sticking to his guns on calling this the AlphaGo Moment for cybersecurity. Skeptics argue Mythos is industrial-scale fuzzing because most found bugs sit in memory-safety territory. However, his counter is the velocity itself. Furthermore, he frames the resistance as carriage-versus-cars: humans-first research still grounds the tool, but throughput is the win. The Firefox CTO put it directly: defenders finally have a chance to win, decisively. For developers asking whether Mythos changes anything if they already run fuzzers, Cochrane’s answer is yes, and not even close. Additionally, he notes Mythos is restricted-access. The broadly available tier is Claude Opus 4.7, which Mozilla used since February before getting onto the restricted program for the Firefox 150 cycle. Run Opus 4.7 first. Sponsor: GoDaddy GoDaddy has been sponsoring this show for over twenty years. Economy hosting starts at $6.99/month, WordPress hosting at $12.99/month, and domains at $11.99. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy for exclusive deals and to directly support the show. Copy Fail: 9-Year Linux Kernel Bug, 732 Bytes to Root A 9-year-old dormant Linux kernel bug got disclosed April 29 as CVE-2026-31431. Researchers published a 732-byte Python script that roots every major Linux distribution shipped since 2017. Additionally, CISA added the CVE to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on May 1 with a May 15 federal deadline. The bug lives in the kernel’s crypto socket layer through the AF_ALG AEAD interface, originating in a 2017 in-place crypto optimization that lacked bounds checking. Cloudflare published their post-mortem this week. Their first instinct was to remove the kernel module entirely. However, service dependencies forced a workaround instead. Cloudflare resumed normal patched-kernel reboot automation across their 330-city fleet on May 4, with manual reboots and rollouts continuing after. Taiwan Rail Stopped by a 23-Year-Old With a Software-Defined Radio A 23-year-old Taiwanese university student with the surname Lin spoofed a TETRA general alarm signal on April 5, stopping trains on Taiwan’s high-speed rail. The accomplice supplied the radio parameters. Both were arrested by month-end. Lin posted NT$100,000 bail; the accomplice posted NT$80,000. The incident hit at 11:23 PM during the Qingming holiday weekend, stopping three revenue passenger trains plus one deadhead. Furthermore, the system has been in service for 19 years without rotating its cryptographic parameters once. Cochrane notes this is exactly the type of long-dormant infrastructure flaw that Mythos-class tooling catches, if anyone bothers to point it at the wires we already have. GitHub MCP Secret Scanning Goes GA GitHub’s secret scanning in the MCP server hit GA on May 5, with dependency scanning entering public preview the same day. Both released after a seven-week public preview run starting March 17. Additionally, the feature lets MCP-compatible coding agents (Copilot CLI, VS Code, JetBrains, Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf) detect exposed secrets ...
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    50 mins
  • GitHub, Goblins, Ghostty, and GPS III #1863

    GitHub, Goblins, Ghostty, and GPS III #1863
    May 1 2026
    In this episode, Ray Cochrane leads with GitHub’s worst reliability month on record and the AI infrastructure pressure behind it. He also covers Warp going open source, Apple’s Mac supply crunch, OpenAI’s goblin tic, the first 1X humanoid factory in the US, Tesla’s Semi finally hitting mass production, Chinese EVs with movie-projecting headlights, the final GPS III satellite, and a quantum researcher who won 1 Bitcoin. – 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 the show with one of the biggest infrastructure stories of the year. GitHub is buckling under unprecedented agentic load, and the world’s largest code host just had its worst reliability month on record. Furthermore, the broader episode threads a clear pattern: AI demand is reshaping infrastructure, hardware supply, and developer tooling in ways the industry did not see coming. GitHub’s Worst Reliability Month on Record GitHub CTO Vlad Fedorov posted an apology on the company blog this week. He acknowledged the platform’s recent failures and committed to a new priority order: availability first, then capacity, then features. Meanwhile, an April 23 merge queue regression silently produced wrong squash commits across 658 repositories and over 2,000 pull requests. Additionally, an Elasticsearch cluster crashed on April 27 after a botnet attack, and GitHub Actions went down on April 28. Outside reconstructions put April uptime under 85 percent. However, GitHub’s own status page stays in the 99 percent range because it does not count degraded performance as downtime. Cochrane notes that GitHub originally planned a 10x capacity increase and has now revised that to 30x in eight months. Mitchell Hashimoto, GitHub user 1299 since 2008, also announced he is pulling his Ghostty terminal off the platform entirely. Warp Terminal Goes Open Source Under AGPL Warp open-sourced its AI-first terminal client this week under the AGPL license. Their contribution model leans heavily on agents handling code, planning, and testing while humans focus on direction and verification. However, Cochrane pushes back on that framing. He argues the recent GitHub problems show that human approval alone is not enough oversight for agent-driven workflows. Additionally, he notes that the more hands-off developers get, the less they can mentally model their own systems. Apple Caught Flat-Footed by Local AI Demand Tim Cook told Wall Street on the Q2 FY2026 earnings call that Mac mini and Mac Studio supply will be constrained for several months. Both machines turned out to be popular local AI workstations, which Apple did not predict. Consequently, Apple discontinued the 512GB Mac Studio upgrade in early March and raised the 256GB upgrade by $400. Some upgraded configurations now show 4 to 5 month delivery estimates. Cochrane connects the demand spike to the OpenClaw wave and his own recent OpenClaw scare, where his install started making suspicious outbound requests. Furthermore, he is in no rush to lean into local agentic tooling given the constant prompt injection and security issues in the space. OpenAI Explains the Goblin Obsession After GPT-5.1 launched, ChatGPT users noticed the model could not stop saying “goblin.” OpenAI traced the bias to the optional Nerdy personality, which was 2.5 percent of all responses but produced 66.7 percent of all goblin mentions. The reward signal during personality training quietly favored creature metaphors. Then the bias leaked into the rest of the model through later supervised fine-tuning. OpenAI retired Nerdy in March, filtered creature words from training data, and added an explicit Codex system prompt rule: never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, or pigeons. Cochrane frames this as the beauty and disaster of pattern matching. Additionally, he notes that LLM behavior is not editable like static code; it can only be patched, and the patches stack up over time. Sponsor: GoDaddy GoDaddy has been sponsoring this show for over twenty years. Economy hosting starts at $6.99/month, WordPress hosting at $12.99/month, and domains at $11.99. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy for exclusive deals and to directly support the show. 1X Opens America’s First Vertically Integrated Humanoid Factory Bloomberg reports that 1X Technologies opened a 58,000 square foot humanoid robot factory in Hayward, California. The Norway-founded, OpenAI-backed company is calling it America’s first vertically integrated humanoid factory. Their goal: 10,000 NEO home humanoids in year one, with a 100,000 unit target by end of 2027. Furthermore, the first 10,000 unit allocation reportedly sold out in five days when ...
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    53 mins
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