Podcasts about captchas

If you're a software engineer right now, you likely feel like your world is changing overnight. We are writing half or less the amount of code that we wrote even a year ago, which represents a seismic, groundbreaking shift in our industry. For many of us, this career has always been engaging for deeply creative and intellectual reasons—and that excitement is still here. But our mental models of what it means to be a good engineer, and what it means to keep improving, have gone a little stale. In today's episode, I want to talk about a distinction that I believe will become the cornerstone mistake for seasoned engineers: confusing _practice_ with _adaptation_, and leaning on the wrong one at the worst possible moment. Two Surfaces Coming Into Contact: Picture your knowledge, skills, and toolset as one surface, and the actual state of the art as another. We've always known the surface area we could learn far exceeds what we can learn, which forces us to place bets on a learning strategy. What's changing is how fast that second surface is moving underneath us. Improvement by Practice vs. Improvement by Change: Practice is wielding what you've already adopted—smoothing out errors, building muscle memory, refining what you already know. Adaptation is fundamentally folding something new into your repertoire. Both are real forms of improvement, but they are not interchangeable. The Cornerstone Mistake for Senior Engineers: Later in your career, the time you spend adapting naturally goes down as you settle into practice. The biggest error I'm already watching engineers make is moving too quickly toward practice when the industry is loudly calling for adaptation instead. Inspect and Adapt—at the Right Altitude: Sprint retros were never really about getting marginally better at the thing you already do. The intent of "inspect and adapt" is to step up one level and examine the system. The trap is treating adaptation like a minor refinement—getting a little better at prompting—when it should mean asking whether you're thinking about prompting in the wrong way entirely. Question the Ratio, Not Just the Output: Real adaptation looks like asking whether you have the right mix of human and agent on a problem. Are you leaning on the agent for things you shouldn't, or failing to lean on it for the things you should? Have you genuinely thought about how sub-agents or an agent team are working the problem you're producing? A Spectrum, Not a Binary: On one end, you make micro-adjustments to your refinement process. On the other end of experimentation, you ask whether refinement—or even having engineers plan the work—is the right thing at all. The point isn't that practice is dead; it's that the industry is changing fast enough that the adaptive end of that spectrum deserves far more of your attention than it used to. Episode Homework: Take something you currently treat as a practice problem—"how do I refine tickets faster?"—and step up a level. Ask the adaptive version of the question instead: "Is refinement even the right thing anymore?"

If you've heard that your job in the agentic coding era is to "become a manager of agents," you may have noticed something doesn't quite fit. Most of us never trained to be managers, and frankly, that's not the role most engineers want. In today's episode, I unpack what that shift _actually_ means — it's closer to a tech lead or architect mindset — and zoom in on a specific interviewing and on-the-job skill that will help you stay employable: how you think about, talk about, and take ownership of failure. Don't Just Bring Star Stories — Bring Failure Stories: Interviewers don't only want to hear how you succeeded. They want to know what you do when the pressure's on and things fall apart. If every story you tell is a highlight reel, there's a built-in social signal that you're hiding something. Get comfortable telling the other kind of story. Identify the Real Problem, Not the Proximal One: The most common failure story I hear in interviews is "the knowledge transfer was bad" or "the docs weren't good." That's not wrong — it's just incomplete. The senior mindset asks why that happened. Why didn't we have docs? Why was context insufficient? Walk it back until you hit something actionable but not too abstract. The Systemic Diagnosis is the Leveled-Up Answer: Fixing the proximal cause fixes this instance. Fixing the root cause fixes the system that keeps producing instances like this. When you connect what you learned to a systemic adjustment, you stop sounding like someone who survived a bad project and start sounding like someone who improves the organization around them. Ownership Means Owning the Outcome, Not the Task: Use the homeowner metaphor. A homeowner doesn't personally fix every leaking pipe — but the outcome of the home is theirs. As an engineer, your scope of ownership has expanded dramatically in the agentic era. You're now responsible for outcomes of code you may not have even read, and the deciding skill is how you carry that responsibility. The Word to Pair With Ownership is Relentlessness: Not in an anxious, burn-yourself-out way. Relentlessness means following a thread to its natural end — through escalation, through asking the next question, through finding the right person if it's not you. It's the antidote to "I'll let someone else handle it" syndrome. You Don't Have to Do It All Yourself: Relentless ownership is not "carry every task across the finish line personally." If you're not qualified, the owner's job is to find who is, communicate risk to stakeholders, and keep the trail alive until the outcome is resolved. That's the differentiator between a senior thinking engineer and a junior one working through assigned tickets. Failure Is Usually a Lapse in Ownership: If you make a list of five things you've failed at (and you should), you'll often find the through-line isn't lack of skill — it's that you stopped escalating, stopped following up, stopped staying with the thing until it was actually resolved. Episode Homework: Write down five real failures. For each one, ask: where did I stop being relentless? What system produced this outcome — and what would I change upstream next time?

Apple Patches Everything https://isc.sans.edu/diary/Apple%20Patches%20Everything/32976 End-to-End Encrypted RCS Messages https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/05/end-to-end-encrypted-rcs-messaging-begins-rolling-out-today-in-beta/ Why we use CAPTCHAs https://isc.sans.edu/diary/Why%20we%20use%20CAPTCHAs/32974 Checkmarx Jenkins AST plugin compromise https://checkmarx.com/blog/ongoing-security-updates/

What happens when you discover that a book that fundamentally changed how you think is built on a shaky foundation? In today's episode, I share my own struggle with the replication crisis surrounding Daniel Kahneman's *Thinking Fast and Slow*, and I use it as a springboard to talk about a much bigger skill: knowing how to update your beliefs when reality shifts underneath you. This isn't about throwing out science or losing trust in your heroes. It's about developing the muscle to replace old explanations with better ones — a skill that has never been more important for software engineers. The Replication Crisis, Briefly Explained: Understand the difference between reproducing a study (re-running the analysis on the original data) and replicating one (recreating the study from the ground up), and why a surprisingly large portion of well-respected psychology research, including studies cited in Thinking Fast and Slow, doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Base Rates Matter: Kahneman didn't pick uniquely bad studies. If you randomly sampled from the broader academic literature, you'd hit the same failure rate. The lesson isn't about one author — it's about how we evaluate any body of knowledge. The Beginning of Infinity Framework: Drawing from David Deutsch's book, explore the idea that all progress is rooted in the assumption that we are fundamentally incorrect, and that improvement comes from continually building better explanations on top of incomplete ones. Beliefs as Calibration, Not Truth: Your beliefs about what makes a good engineer, what makes good code, or what makes a good career move are not eternal truths. They are calibrations to your current reality, and that reality is changing fast. The Ego Trap of Old Beliefs: Notice the very human, very subtle pull to defend things you previously argued for — not because they're still right, but because admitting otherwise creates a discontinuity with your former self. This is one of the biggest blockers to learning. Two Competing Explanations of AI Adoption: Walk through a worked example of holding two predictions about AI in tension and asking honestly which one better explains the reality you're seeing — at both a macro industry level and the micro level of debugging a system. Moving Goalposts Aren't a Conspiracy: A lot of what feels like shifting goalposts in our industry is just goalposts moving on their own. A big part of our job as engineers is figuring out where they are now and predicting where they're heading next. Episode Homework: Pick one belief you hold strongly about your work — about what makes a good engineer, about a tool, about a process. Try to deconstruct it into its parts and ask whether a better explanation exists for what you're actually seeing.

If you're an engineering leader right now, everything around you feels like it's changing at once — new tools, new processes, new expectations. It's tempting to accept chaos as the new normal, but in today's episode, I make the case that your job is to go on the offense and *create* order. Not by clinging to old processes, but by becoming the groundskeeper of your team's ceremonies — the regular, repeated actions that give your team a foundation to actually improve from. Humans Are the Limiting Factor (And That's Okay): Our fundamental cognitive capabilities haven't changed in tens of thousands of years. Progress is collective — better tools, better documentation, better knowledge systems — but individually, our brains work the same way they always have. Any process that involves humans has to account for this. Why Ceremony Matters More Than Ever: Whether you call them scrum ceremonies, team rituals, or just "the way we work," regular and repeated team actions aren't bureaucratic overhead. They're how humans learn, build comfort, and reduce cognitive load. Just like sitting in the same seat at your coffee shop or driving the same route to work, repeated patterns free up mental energy for the things that actually require your attention. Regularity of Action Over Specific Process: This isn't a prescription for scrum or kanban or any particular framework. The point is that your team has some determined, repeated way of doing things — whether that's a weekly planning session, a daily standup, or a trigger-based refinement process. The specific process matters less than the consistency. Ceremony Enables Experimentation: If you want to get better, you need to be able to change one variable at a time and measure the result. That's impossible when everything is changing at once. Holding your core processes steady gives you the controlled environment you need to actually learn what's working and what isn't. Spot the Anomalies: When you maintain regularity, deviations become visible. If productivity dips but your ceremonies stayed constant, you have a much better shot at diagnosing what actually changed. Without that baseline, every signal gets lost in the noise. Episode Homework: Sit down with your team this week and talk about what your ceremonies are. What do you want to hold constant? What do you want to be true on a regular basis? Name them, write them down, and commit to tending them — even as everything else shifts around you.

Web pages may be restricted due to cybersecurity measures and user verification processes like CAPTCHA tests, which protect against automated bots. These bots can perform tasks such as data scraping and spam attacks, necessitating verification systems that require human-like interaction. These measures safeguard both website integrity and user data, while maintaining performance and reliability. Innovations like invisible CAPTCHAs aim to enhance security without compromising user experience.Learn more on this news by visiting us at: https://greyjournal.net/news/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"Hello, Yoshi!" meets the Matrix. Eammonn Dignam explores Nintendo's new toddler lineup and the existential indie thriller "Prove You're Human." Nintendo is expanding the "My Mario" ecosystem with interactive board books, wooden blocks that double as amiibo, and the new "Hello, Yoshi!" app. But for the adults, the developers behind 1000xRESIST and Slay the Princess have unveiled Prove You're Human—a narrative adventure that uses CAPTCHAs to challenge our views on AI and self-identity. We break down the "My Mario" rollout and why your hatred of "I am not a robot" tests is about to become your next gaming obsession. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Your tool set isn't just a collection of utilities — it's the environment you live in every day, and it's shaping you whether you realize it or not. In today's episode, I explore two principles that senior engineers consistently apply to their workflows, regardless of which specific tools they're using. As our industry goes through one of the most rapid periods of change in the last 20 years, the engineers who thrive won't be the ones chasing every new tool — they'll be the ones who obsess over reducing friction in the work they do most often. Honor the Grief: Many engineers are experiencing a real sense of loss as the deep cultural connections to languages, communities, and hand-written code begin to shift. Recognizing and processing that grief — rather than letting it turn into reflexive rejection of new tools — is essential to thinking clearly about what comes next. "We Shape Our Tools, Then Our Tools Shape Us": Your tools aren't neutral. A bad monitor height, a faulty keycap, or a clunky deployment process all shape you back — draining focus, breaking flow, and compounding over time. The most senior engineers treat this relationship as a first-class concern. Principle 1 — Tools Are Your Environment: There's a spectrum from "tool" to "environment," and most of what you work with sits somewhere in between. Your terminal, your desk, your claude.md file — all of these are environment. Sharpening your tools means shaping your environment, and shaping your environment is sharpening your tools. Friction Is the Lever: You don't need a dramatic overhaul to change your behavior. Tiny reductions in friction — a two-letter alias, a key binding to run tests, setting your shoes out the night before — have an outsized effect on how often you actually do the things you want to do. James Clear's Atomic Habits framework applies directly to engineering workflows. Principle 2 — First Order Thinking: Borrowed from Adam Savage's concept of "first order retrievability," the idea is simple: identify what you do most often and invest in making that better. Not faster, not just automated — better. If you do something a hundred times a day, even a small improvement compounds dramatically. Invest in the Fundamentals: Your standups, your one-on-ones, your specifications, your prompting skills — these are the repetitive, high-frequency activities where your biggest growth opportunities live. Stop assuming you've "arrived" on the basics just because nobody is giving you negative feedback. Episode Homework: Look around your workspace right now — physical and digital. Identify one thing you do repeatedly where friction is slowing you down or discouraging follow-through, and make one small change to reduce that friction today.

A decade ago, Kevin Gosschalk was talking CAPTCHAs and bot mitigation with Marco Ciappelli at a security conference. Today, at RSAC Conference 2026, the conversation has shifted to agentic AI -- autonomous systems that browse, click, and transact on behalf of users. For Gosschalk, the Founder and CEO of Arkose Labs, the technology has changed but the challenge is familiar: how do you tell the difference between a legitimate automated actor and a malicious one? Gosschalk explains that the vast majority of agentic traffic today is not self-identifying. Rather than announcing themselves as AI agents, these systems impersonate real Chrome browsers on Mac OS -- choosing configurations with stronger privacy features to evade fingerprinting. There are two technical categories to contend with: headless browsers running in the cloud, which can be caught through device spoofing checks, and on-device agents that control a real browser instance, which require a deeper look at behavioral patterns and intent signals. Arkose Labs builds intent models around payment fraud, fake account creation, and account compromise to distinguish the good agents from the bad. The economic framing Gosschalk brings to this conversation is striking. He describes SMS toll fraud -- where bad actors acquire millions of premium phone numbers and trigger OTP messages from victim companies, earning three to six cents per message while costing those companies tens of millions of dollars annually. He walks through micro deposit fraud targeting fintechs. His core thesis: fraud is an economic activity, and the best defense is making attacks more expensive than they are worth. Arkose Labs builds challenge mechanisms designed to raise that cost through novel stimuli that ML models have not been trained to solve -- presenting something genuinely new forces a brute-force approach that is less effective than purpose-built attacks. The platform's consortium model is a key differentiator. Arkose Labs protects large enterprises including Expedia and Meta, and when an attack signature appears on one customer but nowhere else in the network, its uniqueness is itself a strong fraud signal. Customers can also feed labeled outcome data back into the system -- if something slips through and later proves malicious, that label sharpens the model for the entire consortium. Gosschalk is equally clear about the opportunity side of agentic AI. Blocking all automated traffic is no longer viable -- legitimate agentic commerce is coming, where consumers will delegate shopping, comparison, and purchasing to AI assistants. The future is not blanket blocking but granular, policy-driven enforcement: letting each customer define what kinds of agentic behavior they want to permit on their platforms. Integration is accessible -- a basic JavaScript deployment for web, SDKs for mobile, and extended support for IoT devices and CDN integrations. This is a Brand Spotlight. A Brand Spotlight is a ~15 minute conversation designed to explore the guest, their company, and what makes their approach unique. Learn more: https://www.studioc60.com/creation#spotlight GUEST Kevin Gosschalk, Founder and CEO, Arkose Labs LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kgosschalk/ RESOURCES Arkose Labs: https://www.arkoselabs.com Are you interested in telling your story? ▶︎ Full Length Brand Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#full ▶︎ Brand Spotlight Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#spotlight ▶︎ Brand Highlight Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#highlight KEYWORDS Kevin Gosschalk, Arkose Labs, Sean Martin, Marco Ciappelli, brand story, brand marketing, marketing podcast, brand spotlight, agentic AI, bot detection, bot mitigation, fraud prevention, SMS toll fraud, micro deposit fraud, behavioral biometrics, intent detection, CAPTCHA, account takeover, synthetic identity, RSAC Conference 2026, cybersecurity Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The Power of Physical Checklists: Inspired by aviation, Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto, and Daniel Kahneman's Noise, I've been experimenting with printed, physical checklists for repetitive tasks — from producing this show to running one-on-ones. The rigor of writing precise procedures carries over into clearer communication with both humans and AI agents. Small Interventions, Big Returns: A Brother P-Touch label maker. Reorganizing scattered hobby gear. 3D printing organizational tools with a new Bambu Labs P1S. None of these are revolutionary on their own, but the compounding effect of better organization — essentially building a fast index for your physical life — pays back over and over. Context Shapes Focus: Switching from a home gym to working out at Planet Fitness with my brother-in-law was one of the best focus interventions I've made. The change in environment eliminated the procrastination and context-blending that came from being steps away from my computer. If you're struggling with a habit, sometimes the environment is the variable to change, not your willpower. The Reading List: Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt (and its follow-up The Crux), The Art of Action by Stephen Bungay (a great framework for thinking about agentic workflows), How to Know a Person by David Brooks, and my top recommendation: 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman — a book that will help you stop looking for the productivity hack that fixes everything and start thinking about what actually matters. Learning as a Habit: Right now I'm learning to drive a stick shift on a 1983 Bronco. The point isn't the skill itself — it's staying in the beginner's seat. Intentional practice, setting small goals, refining through repetition. Keeping this habit alive is more important than ever when the industry demands rapid adaptation. How I'm Actually Using AI: Claude Code for one-shotting tools with clear boundaries, local environment improvements, and terminal troubleshooting. OpenClaw for experimental agents like a personalized trip planner and Home Assistant automations via YAML. Claude Co-Work for file system management and screenshot organization. Obsidian as the connective tissue — a markdown knowledge base that gives AI agents personal context to work with. And at work, spec-driven development is showing real promise for shaping agent output quality. A Framework for Thinking About AI's Role: I break AI use cases into categories: automating existing workflows (where most gains are today), operational restructuring (what happens when you free humans from a task), execution of complex technical work (agents on the front lines), iterative consulting on intent and goals, and the emerging frontier of exploratory connections and strategic synthesis. What You Should Actually Do: Be action-oriented — the cat is out of the bag. Invest heavily in planning and specification before sending agents off to work. But more importantly, invest in mindful change: understand your own values, figure out who you want to be when you look back on this moment in 10 years, and let that guide your decisions about adoption, learning, and career direction.

If you're a software engineer right now, you likely feel like your world is changing overnight. We are writing half or less the amount of code that we wrote even a year ago, which represents a seismic, groundbreaking shift in our industry. However, the rapid introduction of new tools can slide quickly from exciting to purely chaotic, leaving you feeling like you are falling behind. In today's episode, I explore how this changes the nature of our day-to-day work, and why the key to surviving this transition is shifting your mindset from a traditional "Software Engineer" to an "Agent Manager". The Illusion of Velocity vs. Actual Chaos: While the big-picture promise of AI is that the software development pipeline will move exponentially faster, the reality on the ground often feels like unadulterated chaos. Trying to adopt every new tool while spinning up multiple agents to work on parallel tickets introduces a massive new cognitive burden. The Context-Switching Trap: Understand why parallelizing agent workflows fundamentally changes your context-switching overhead. You are no longer just reloading context to build something yourself; you are reloading it to manage, review, and validate a building agent, which rapidly drains your cognitive ability and leads to burnout. The "Agent Manager" Mindset: Treating AI as just a "smart autocomplete" while you try to do the same old job will not work. You need to start viewing your role more like assembly line or process management, focusing on facilitating the system rather than typing every line of syntax. Adopt Old-School Quality Control Tactics: Discover how traditional management methods are becoming essential for individual contributors. Just like a factory manager doesn't inspect every single item off the line, you must develop methods for spot checks, anomaly detection, and standardizing outputs to evaluate the quality and quantity of your agents' work. Shift Your Work Upfront: Recognize that your core effort must move to the specification and planning phases. Your job is increasingly about setting the context, defining the prompt, and establishing strict guardrails before the agent begins its work. Redefining Your Work in Progress (WIP): Proven principles like limiting WIP and focusing on finishing rather than starting are more important than ever to reduce cognitive burden. However, you must adapt these principles to fit a workflow where you are managing processes rather than manually coding. Episode Homework: Take a step back and ask yourself: "What is my true work in progress? Am I actually manually doing these tickets, or am I managing the processes that produce quality ticket work?".

Today we have Andrew Northern, Principal Security Researcher at Censys, discussing "From Evasion to Evidence: Exploiting the Funneling Behavior of Injects". This research explains how modern web malware campaigns use multi-stage JavaScript injections, redirects, and fake CAPTCHAs to selectively deliver payloads and evade detection. It shows that these attack chains rely on stable redirect and traffic-distribution chokepoints that can be monitored at scale. Using the SmartApe campaign as a case study, the report demonstrates how defenders can turn those chokepoints into high-confidence detection and tracking opportunities. The research can be found here: From Evasion to Evidence: Exploiting the Funneling Behavior of Injects Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we have Andrew Northern, Principal Security Researcher at Censys, discussing "From Evasion to Evidence: Exploiting the Funneling Behavior of Injects". This research explains how modern web malware campaigns use multi-stage JavaScript injections, redirects, and fake CAPTCHAs to selectively deliver payloads and evade detection. It shows that these attack chains rely on stable redirect and traffic-distribution chokepoints that can be monitored at scale. Using the SmartApe campaign as a case study, the report demonstrates how defenders can turn those chokepoints into high-confidence detection and tracking opportunities. The research can be found here: From Evasion to Evidence: Exploiting the Funneling Behavior of Injects Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tired of being asked if you're human? I'll explain what site owners like me are dealing with behind the scenes and why you'll probably be clicking “I'm not a robot” a lot more often.

Get an extra four months of ExpressVPN for free: go to https://www.expressvpn.com/official Get additional episodes and bonus content with early access (try now with 7 DAYS FREE): go to https://www.OFFICIAL.men Three close man-friends gather to talk about Kaya's medical emergency. This is the Official Podcast. Every Tuesday. Links Below. THE OFFICIAL NETWORK CHANNEL (SUBSCRIBE NOW): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcHYe-Qw7qUN5gFWMdj9nNw Episode 469: Recorded 19/12/25 --- Get additional episodes and bonus content with early access: Go to https://www.OFFICIAL.men or https://www.PATREON.com/THEOFFICIALPODCAST --- Timestamps: [00:00:00] Intro [00:00:29] Being tired and miserable [00:01:31] Gorilla enclosure experiments [00:02:22] Would you do 50 CAPTCHAs for sleep? [00:15:40] Kaya's spewing story [00:53:30] Secret pooping and vomiting methods [00:58:37] Women's bathrooms vs. trough urinals [01:00:14] Jackson's drunken night in Japan [01:04:03] Tipping and Japanese hospitality [01:06:53] Wrap --- Audio Platforms (Spotify, Apple, Amazon, & Castbox): https://linktr.ee/theofficialpodcast Other Shows: https://linktr.ee/theofficialnetwork --- Hosts: Jackson: https://twitter.com/zealotonpc Andrew: https://twitter.com/huggbeestv Kaya: https://twitter.com/kayaorsan --- Additional Links: Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcHYe-Qw7qUN5gFWMdj9nNw Subreddit: https://reddit.com/r/theofficialpodcast Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theofficialpodcast Intro by: https://www.youtube.com/c/Derpmii Music by: https://soundcloud.com/inst1nctive & https://www.instagram.com/00zaya Art by: https://www.instagram.com/nook_eilyk/ & https://www.instagram.com/vaux.z Edited by: https://www.instagram.com/00zaya Designer: http://www.jr-design-co.com/ Produced by Jackson Clarke for The Official Network Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Web scraping has entered a new era and AI is changing everything. In this videocast, Osman Celik speaks with Dmitriy Loshakov from QRator Labs to explore how automated data collection has evolved from simple crawling into highly adaptive, human-like scraping attacks that operate invisibly. You’ll learn: ✅ What web scraping actually is (and why not all scraping is malicious)✅ How AI-powered scrapers mimic real user behavior with mouse movements, delays & clicks✅ Why classic defenses like CAPTCHAs and JS challenges no longer stop modern bots✅ The industries hit hardest — from e-commerce and travel to betting, finance, and media✅ How organizations can defend themselves using behavioral analysis & intent detection✅ Why the future of cybersecurity is officially AI vs. AI

In this episode of Banking on Fraudology, Hailey Windham reflects on a transformational year in fraud by unpacking recent, high-stakes cases and zooming out to address the "seismic shift" in the payment ecosystem. The conversation dives into the industry's evolution , highlighting how human intuition, technology, and a unified view of risk are shaping the future of fraud prevention. Key Takeaways: Cases, Controls, and the Future of PaymentsEmpathy and Human Intuition are Essential: The episode shares several cases that underscore the power of the human element.The Mrs. Doubtfire Scam: A bizarre case where a man disguised himself as his deceased 82-year-old mother to collect her pension for three years. The case was cracked by a frontline clerk who noticed the hands looked too young and the voice slipped, proving that intuition is irreplaceable. The Frontline Hero: A Missouri bank teller saved a woman from a jury duty arrest scam by quietly slipping her a note, proving that no AI system can replace human compassion and intuition. The End of Siloed Intelligence (Internal Threat): Insider threats highlight a control problem, not just an employee problem. Cases involving unauthorized withdrawals, debit card ordering, and forged checks by multiple employees at a major US bank point to patterns of inadequate monitoring and excessive permissions. The Tacoma Credit Union case, where a remote employee stole $345,000 weeks after hire, reinforces that remote work requires stronger oversight, and new hires are high-risk periods. Innovation is Working For Us (External Threats): Scams are evolving alongside technology. Scammers are using real bank activity (transaction amounts and timestamps) to build trust and bypass knowledge-based authentication. New tactics include fake CAPTCHAs that install malware to bypass 2FA, log keystrokes, and spy on sessions, leading to rapidly climbing losses. The State of the Fraud Fighter (Payment Rail Shift): The industry must adapt to the speed of instant payments. Scams are the #1 driver of losses across every rail (ACH, Wires, P2P, Zelle, RTP, FedNow); the vulnerability is social engineering, not the rail itself. The number one strategic imperative is to build a unified, real-time view of risk across every payment rail, as regulators now demand real-time resilience and proof that harm could have been prevented. Get in the mood of being grateful for the fraud-fighting community, and be reminded of how strong the fraud-fighting community truly is. Show Notes — Resources & Articles MentionedInsider Fraud Cases1 - Multiple Trust Employees Accused of Draining Customer Accounts — $363,452 in Losses2 - The “Mrs. Doubtfire” Fraud Case (Italian Identity Fraud Scandal) - Source via Frank on Fraud (PDF)3 - Tacoma Credit Union Insider Steals...

Rogue Negotiators, Gemini Pulled, Apple's AI Shift, Disappearing CAPTCHAs, and Aaran Leyland on the Security Weekly News. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/swn for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/swn-526

Rogue Negotiators, Gemini Pulled, Apple's AI Shift, Disappearing CAPTCHAs, and Aaran Leyland on the Security Weekly News. Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/swn-526

Rogue Negotiators, Gemini Pulled, Apple's AI Shift, Disappearing CAPTCHAs, and Aaran Leyland on the Security Weekly News. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/swn for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/swn-526

Rogue Negotiators, Gemini Pulled, Apple's AI Shift, Disappearing CAPTCHAs, and Aaran Leyland on the Security Weekly News. Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/swn-526

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OpenAI patches a ChatGPT flaw that could have exposed Gmail data. CISA documents malware exploiting two Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) flaws. WatchGuard patches a critical flaw in its Firebox firewalls. MI6 launches a dark web snitch site. The DoD looks to cut its cybersecurity job hiring time just 25 days. Researchers trick ChatGPT agents into solving CAPTCHAs. A UK teen faces accusations of being part of the Scattered Spider gang. The Senate confirms a new assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy. A former CIA officer is accused of selling classified information to private clients. Karin Ophir Zimet, Torq's Chief People Officer, is speaking with N2K Senior Workforce Analyst Will Markow about their internship program for upleveling AI skills. Russia's AI propaganda goes prime time.  Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Miss an episode? Sign-up for our daily intelligence roundup, Daily Briefing, and you'll never miss a beat. And be sure to follow CyberWire Daily on LinkedIn. CyberWire Guest Karin Ophir Zimet, Torq's Chief People Officer, is speaking with N2K Senior Workforce Analyst Will Markow about their internship program for upleveling AI skills. Selected Reading OpenAI Fixed ChatGPT Security Flaw That Put Gmail Data at Risk (Bloomberg) CISA Analyzes Malware From Ivanti EPMM Intrusions (SecurityWeek) WatchGuard Issues Fix for 9.3-Rated Firebox Firewall Vulnerability (HackRead) MI6 upgrades dark web portal to recruit new spies (The Register) DOD official: We need to drop the cybersecurity talent hiring window to 25 days (CyberScoop) ChatGPT Tricked Into Solving CAPTCHAs (SecurityWeek) Scattered Spider teen cuffed after crypto splurge on games (The Register) Senate confirms Sutton as Pentagon cyber policy chief (The Record) Contractor Used Classified CIA Systems as ‘His Own Personal Google' (404 Media) Russian State TV Launches AI-Generated News Satire Show (404 Media) Share your feedback. What do you think about CyberWire Daily? Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts with us by completing our brief listener survey. Thank you for helping us continue to improve our show. Want to hear your company in the show? You too can reach the most influential leaders and operators in the industry. Here's our media kit. Contact us at cyberwire@n2k.com to request more info. The CyberWire is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © N2K Networks, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

L'été a été noir sur le front de la cybersécurité. Benoît Grunemwald, expert cybersécurité, fait le point sur les dernières cybermenaces. Au programme : des attaques de grande ampleur, une nouvelle technique de piratage via de faux captchas, et l'émergence d'un ransomware boosté à l'intelligence artificielle.En partenariat avec ESETDerrière les fuites de données qui ont touché France Travail, Air France-KLM, Orange ou Bouygues Télécom, des techniques toujours plus sournoises : hameçonnage, infostealers, ingénierie sociale et compromission de comptes employés. Benoît Grunemwald lève le voile sur ces méthodes redoutables — y compris une arnaque inédite qui détourne les captchas pour pousser l'utilisateur à installer lui-même un logiciel malveillant via une simple ligne de commande.Nous parlons également de PromptLock, un ransomware de nouvelle génération capable de s'adapter en temps réel grâce à l'intelligence artificielle, rendant la détection et la prévention encore plus difficiles.

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Germany's Tech-Driven Warfare & Ethical ImplicationsGermany is integrating AI, robotics, and human-machine teaming into its military, deploying tech like robotic cockroaches for surveillance and mini-robots for urban combat. These innovations aim to enhance decision-making and minimize human risk. Yet, critics warn of ethical and legal concerns, especially around loss of human oversight in lethal decisions. Despite official claims that humans will remain in control, the autonomy debate continues.Astronomer's "Kiss Cam" ScandalA viral Coldplay concert “Kiss Cam” captured Astronomer's CEO and Chief People Officer—both married—trying to avoid public display. The clip, viewed over 127 million times, sparked privacy concerns and led to their resignations. In a PR twist, Astronomer hired Gwyneth Paltrow (ex-wife of Coldplay's Chris Martin) as a temporary spokesperson to steer attention back to the company's data automation services.Tea App's Privacy BreachesThe women's dating safety app “Tea” was compromised twice. First, 72,000 private images, including IDs and selfies, were leaked due to an unsecured Firebase database. A second breach exposed over a million sensitive messages containing personal info and taboo topics. Despite promises of anonymity, users' names, social links, and phone numbers were often easily traceable—defeating the app's core promise of safety.WhoFi and the Future of SurveillanceWhoFi, a surveillance system developed at La Sapienza University, uses Wi-Fi distortions (Channel State Information) to uniquely identify individuals based on their body's impact on signal patterns. Achieving up to 95.5% accuracy, it can track people without phones or devices, raising serious privacy concerns about ubiquitous, passive surveillance with no opt-out.ChatGPT Agent Bypasses SecurityOpenAI's ChatGPT Agent demonstrated it can bypass Cloudflare's anti-bot “I am not a robot” checks. Operating in a sandboxed browser environment, it navigated multi-step verifications without CAPTCHAs. This challenges the efficacy of current web security protocols and signals that anti-bot measures may be obsolete in the face of advanced AI agents.AI-Driven Pricing Controversy in AirlinesAmerican Airlines' CEO slammed Delta for using AI in airfare pricing, labeling it “bait and switch.” Delta claims uniform pricing across channels and denies tailoring fares per customer. While Delta plans broader AI deployment, competitors like Southwest and American reject AI pricing, citing privacy concerns and potential fare manipulation.Clorox Hack & Vendor NegligenceA 2023 cyberattack cost Clorox $380 million due to a security lapse by its IT vendor, Cognizant. Hackers impersonated Clorox employees and tricked service desk agents into resetting credentials—no identity checks were performed. Now, Clorox is suing Cognizant for damages stemming from this avoidable breach.North Korean Espionage via Remote WorkNorth Korean operatives used stolen identities to land remote IT jobs at major U.S. firms like Nike and Chick-fil-A. Aided by VPNs and paid stand-ins for interviews, they funneled salaries to the regime. A U.S. woman received 8.5 years in prison for facilitating this scheme, which exposed sensitive company data and posed national security risks.

In this episode of 'Cybersecurity Today,' host Jim Love covers several significant cybersecurity incidents. Hackers disrupt all Aeroflot flights, causing massive delays in Russia. The women-only dating app 'Tea' faces a second serious data leak, exposing 1.1 million private messages. A game on Steam named 'Camia' is found to contain three types of malware, including Info Stealers and a Backdoor. Additionally, researchers discover that OpenAI's GPT-4 agent can bypass CAPTCHAs, raising concerns about the future of this security measure. 00:00 Introduction and Headlines 00:28 Tea App's Major Data Breaches 02:29 Aeroflot Cyber Attack Disrupts Flights 04:22 Malware Found in Steam Game 06:27 OpenAI's GPT-4 Bypasses Captchas 08:59 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

The debate over whether Apple should acquire an AI company to stay competitive, with Perplexity as a leading candidate, is a hot topic. Chuck Joiner, David Ginsburg, Web Bixby, Eric Bolden, Marty Jencius, Jim Rea, and Brian Flanigan-Arthurs explore past acquisitions, Apple's AI strategy, and the challenges of merging company cultures. PSAs about malware from screenshots and fake CAPTCHAs are discussed, along with the growing risks of AI litigation and the hype vs. reality of AI's future.  Today's MacVoices is supported by Bzigo. Don't wait until the next bite—protect your home with Bzigo. Go to bzigo.com/discount/BUZZ10 to save 10% off. Show Notes: Chapters: 00:07 Introduction to Apple and AI01:45 Panel Introductions06:51 Public Service Announcements07:50 Apple's AI Acquisition Debate20:56 Mark Fuccio's Departure21:15 Bzigo Sponsorship Announcement22:42 Marty Gensius on AI Perspectives28:21 The Future of AI and Apple31:24 Closing Thoughts on Apple and Acquisitions36:38 AI Singularity vs. Limitations Links: There's New Reason to Never Keep Screenshots of Private Information on Your Phonehttps://lifehacker.com/tech/never-keep-private-information-screenshots-on-phone Watch Out for Fake CAPTCHAs That Spread Malware
 https://lifehacker.com/tech/captcha-malware-warning Apple Will Need to Leave Its M&A Comfort Zone to Succeed in AIhttps://archive.is/Z2ULZ Guests: Web Bixby has been in the insurance business for 40 years and has been an Apple user for longer than that.You can catch up with him on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Eric Bolden is into macOS, plants, sci-fi, food, and is a rural internet supporter. You can connect with him on Twitter, by email at embolden@mac.com, on Mastodon at @eabolden@techhub.social, on his blog, Trending At Work, and as co-host on The Vision ProFiles podcast. Brian Flanigan-Arthurs is an educator with a passion for providing results-driven, innovative learning strategies for all students, but particularly those who are at-risk. He is also a tech enthusiast who has a particular affinity for Apple since he first used the Apple IIGS as a student. You can contact Brian on twitter as @brian8944. He also recently opened a Mastodon account at @brian8944@mastodon.cloud. David Ginsburg is the host of the weekly podcast In Touch With iOS where he discusses all things iOS, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and related technologies. He is an IT professional supporting Mac, iOS and Windows users. Visit his YouTube channel at https://youtube.com/daveg65 and find and follow him on Twitter @daveg65 and on Mastodon at @daveg65@mastodon.cloud. Dr. Marty Jencius has been an Associate Professor of Counseling at Kent State University since 2000. He has over 120 publications in books, chapters, journal articles, and others, along with 200 podcasts related to counseling, counselor education, and faculty life. His technology interest led him to develop the counseling profession ‘firsts,' including listservs, a web-based peer-reviewed journal, The Journal of Technology in Counseling, teaching and conferencing in virtual worlds as the founder of Counselor Education in Second Life, and podcast founder/producer of CounselorAudioSource.net and ThePodTalk.net. Currently, he produces a podcast about counseling and life questions, the Circular Firing Squad, and digital video interviews with legacies capturing the history of the counseling field. This is also co-host of The Vision ProFiles podcast. Generally, Marty is chasing the newest tech trends, which explains his interest in A.I. for teaching, research, and productivity. Marty is an active presenter and past president of the NorthEast Ohio Apple Corp (NEOAC). Jim Rea built his own computer from scratch in 1975, started programming in 1977, and has been an independent Mac developer continuously since 1984. He is the founder of ProVUE Development, and the author of Panorama X, ProVUE's ultra fast RAM based database software for the macOS platform. He's been a speaker at MacTech, MacWorld Expo and other industry conferences. Follow Jim at provue.com and via @provuejim@techhub.social on Mastodon. Support:      Become a MacVoices Patron on Patreon     http://patreon.com/macvoices      Enjoy this episode? Make a one-time donation with PayPal Connect:      Web:     http://macvoices.com      Twitter:     http://www.twitter.com/chuckjoiner     http://www.twitter.com/macvoices      Mastodon:     https://mastodon.cloud/@chuckjoiner      Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/chuck.joiner      MacVoices Page on Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/macvoices/      MacVoices Group on Facebook:     http://www.facebook.com/groups/macvoice      LinkedIn:     https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckjoiner/      Instagram:     https://www.instagram.com/chuckjoiner/ Subscribe:      Audio in iTunes     Video in iTunes      Subscribe manually via iTunes or any podcatcher:      Audio: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesrss      Video: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesvideorss

The debate over whether Apple should acquire an AI company to stay competitive, with Perplexity as a leading candidate, is a hot topic. Chuck Joiner, David Ginsburg, Web Bixby, Eric Bolden, Marty Jencius, Jim Rea, and Brian Flanigan-Arthurs explore past acquisitions, Apple's AI strategy, and the challenges of merging company cultures. PSAs about malware from screenshots and fake CAPTCHAs are discussed, along with the growing risks of AI litigation and the hype vs. reality of AI's future.  Today's MacVoices is supported by Bzigo. Don't wait until the next bite—protect your home with Bzigo. Go to bzigo.com/discount/BUZZ10 to save 10% off. Show Notes: Chapters: 00:07 Introduction to Apple and AI 01:45 Panel Introductions 06:51 Public Service Announcements 07:50 Apple's AI Acquisition Debate 20:56 Mark Fuccio's Departure 21:15 Bzigo Sponsorship Announcement 22:42 Marty Gensius on AI Perspectives 28:21 The Future of AI and Apple 31:24 Closing Thoughts on Apple and Acquisitions 36:38 AI Singularity vs. Limitations Links: There's New Reason to Never Keep Screenshots of Private Information on Your Phone https://lifehacker.com/tech/never-keep-private-information-screenshots-on-phone Watch Out for Fake CAPTCHAs That Spread Malware
https://lifehacker.com/tech/captcha-malware-warning Apple Will Need to Leave Its M&A Comfort Zone to Succeed in AI https://archive.is/Z2ULZ Guests: Web Bixby has been in the insurance business for 40 years and has been an Apple user for longer than that.You can catch up with him on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Eric Bolden is into macOS, plants, sci-fi, food, and is a rural internet supporter. You can connect with him on Twitter, by email at embolden@mac.com, on Mastodon at @eabolden@techhub.social, on his blog, Trending At Work, and as co-host on The Vision ProFiles podcast. Brian Flanigan-Arthurs is an educator with a passion for providing results-driven, innovative learning strategies for all students, but particularly those who are at-risk. He is also a tech enthusiast who has a particular affinity for Apple since he first used the Apple IIGS as a student. You can contact Brian on twitter as @brian8944. He also recently opened a Mastodon account at @brian8944@mastodon.cloud. David Ginsburg is the host of the weekly podcast In Touch With iOS where he discusses all things iOS, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and related technologies. He is an IT professional supporting Mac, iOS and Windows users. Visit his YouTube channel at https://youtube.com/daveg65 and find and follow him on Twitter @daveg65 and on Mastodon at @daveg65@mastodon.cloud. Dr. Marty Jencius has been an Associate Professor of Counseling at Kent State University since 2000. He has over 120 publications in books, chapters, journal articles, and others, along with 200 podcasts related to counseling, counselor education, and faculty life. His technology interest led him to develop the counseling profession ‘firsts,' including listservs, a web-based peer-reviewed journal, The Journal of Technology in Counseling, teaching and conferencing in virtual worlds as the founder of Counselor Education in Second Life, and podcast founder/producer of CounselorAudioSource.net and ThePodTalk.net. Currently, he produces a podcast about counseling and life questions, the Circular Firing Squad, and digital video interviews with legacies capturing the history of the counseling field. This is also co-host of The Vision ProFiles podcast. Generally, Marty is chasing the newest tech trends, which explains his interest in A.I. for teaching, research, and productivity. Marty is an active presenter and past president of the NorthEast Ohio Apple Corp (NEOAC). Jim Rea built his own computer from scratch in 1975, started programming in 1977, and has been an independent Mac developer continuously since 1984. He is the founder of ProVUE Development, and the author of Panorama X, ProVUE's ultra fast RAM based database software for the macOS platform. He's been a speaker at MacTech, MacWorld Expo and other industry conferences. Follow Jim at provue.com and via @provuejim@techhub.social on Mastodon. Support:      Become a MacVoices Patron on Patreon      http://patreon.com/macvoices      Enjoy this episode? Make a one-time donation with PayPal Connect:      Web:      http://macvoices.com      Twitter:      http://www.twitter.com/chuckjoiner      http://www.twitter.com/macvoices      Mastodon:      https://mastodon.cloud/@chuckjoiner      Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/chuck.joiner      MacVoices Page on Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/macvoices/      MacVoices Group on Facebook:      http://www.facebook.com/groups/macvoice      LinkedIn:      https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuckjoiner/      Instagram:      https://www.instagram.com/chuckjoiner/ Subscribe:      Audio in iTunes      Video in iTunes      Subscribe manually via iTunes or any podcatcher:      Audio: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesrss      Video: http://www.macvoices.com/rss/macvoicesvideorss

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In this episode, Pete and Tyler discuss various friction points on websites that hinder revenue generation for publishers. They explore issues such as ad blockers, CAPTCHA effectiveness, checkout processes, content protection methods, and the balance between advertising and user experience. They also emphasize the importance of optimizing user engagement to enhance subscription conversions and overall revenue.Takeaways:Your website is letting you down if it's not optimized for user experience.Ad blockers can significantly impact your revenue if not managed properly.CAPTCHA systems can deter potential subscribers if they're too aggressive.Streamlining the checkout process is crucial for digital subscriptions.Asking for too much information during signup can hurt conversion rates.Content protection methods like disabling right-click are often ineffective.Balancing ads with user experience is essential for retaining subscribers.Nurturing your audience through email engagement can drive traffic back to your site.Fewer free articles can lead to higher registration rates.Your content should be leveraged to require email signups for access. Learn more about Leaky Paywall, the most flexible subscription platform for news and magazine publishers.

In this jam-packed episode celebrating Towel Day, the TWiT crew dives into Apple's terrible week with Trump's tariff threats, Google and Microsoft's latest AI advances, the death of CAPTCHAs, and some wild new tech including laser-powered smart homes and sock-picking robot vacuums. Trump's Phone Tariff Ultimatum - President threatens 25% tariffs on iPhones and Samsung devices unless manufacturing moves to the US, putting Apple in an impossible position between economics and politics The Sock-Stealing Robot Revolution - Jennifer tests a $2,600 Roborock vacuum with an arm that picks up socks and occasionally tries to grab cats Microsoft's AI Science Breakthrough - Microsoft Build showcases agentic AI platform that helped create new coolant liquids by analyzing scientific journals and generating novel molecular compounds Windows Goes Agentic - Microsoft announces MCP protocol integration into Windows, raising both excitement about AI capabilities and concerns about data security Gaming Industry Consolidation - FTC finally drops its challenge to Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition after three years of failed legal battles Meta's Monopoly Defense Strategy - Company argues that Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions were beneficial rather than anti-competitive, as antitrust trial concludes Google's Hyper-Realistic AI Videos - Veo 3 generates convincing fake videos that blur the line between reality and AI creation, raising concerns about misinformation Revenge Porn Legislation Concerns - New "Take It Down" Act passes with bipartisan support but raises censorship worries about its 48-hour removal requirements Smart Glasses Make a Comeback - Google announces Android XR partnerships with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster, signaling the return of consumer AR eyewear The $6.5 Billion AI Hardware Gamble - OpenAI's record-breaking acquisition of Jony Ive's design firm sparks debate about whether AI needs dedicated hardware devices Amazon's Smart Speaker Surveillance - Investigation reveals how much personal data Echo devices collect and store, highlighting the privacy costs of convenient AI assistants The Death of CAPTCHAs - AI now solves visual puzzles better than humans, making traditional bot-detection methods obsolete and forcing a rethink of online security America Abandons the Penny - The US will stop minting pennies due to production costs exceeding face value, ending a century-old currency tradition Air Traffic Control Crisis Exposed - Newark Airport's radar failures reveal America's dangerously outdated aviation infrastructure held together by 1990s technology and hope Fortnite's App Store Victory - Epic Games successfully returns to iOS after Apple quickly capitulates under legal pressure, ending years of bitter disputes Brain-Computer Interface Competition - Valve's Gabe Newell announces Neuralink competitor, expanding the race to connect human brains directly to computers Infrared Contact Lenses Enable Night Vision - Researchers develop contacts that let wearers see heat signatures even with eyes closed, promising superhuman vision capabilities 23andMe's Genetic Data Gold Rush - Regeneron Pharmaceuticals acquires the DNA testing company for $256 million, raising questions about genetic privacy and Stolen These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1033 Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, Brian McCullough, and Mike Elgan Sponsors: outsystems.com/twit expressvpn.com/twit spaceship.com/twit uscloud.com storyblok.com/twittv-25

In this jam-packed episode celebrating Towel Day, the TWiT crew dives into Apple's terrible week with Trump's tariff threats, Google and Microsoft's latest AI advances, the death of CAPTCHAs, and some wild new tech including laser-powered smart homes and sock-picking robot vacuums. Trump's Phone Tariff Ultimatum - President threatens 25% tariffs on iPhones and Samsung devices unless manufacturing moves to the US, putting Apple in an impossible position between economics and politics The Sock-Stealing Robot Revolution - Jennifer tests a $2,600 Roborock vacuum with an arm that picks up socks and occasionally tries to grab cats Microsoft's AI Science Breakthrough - Microsoft Build showcases agentic AI platform that helped create new coolant liquids by analyzing scientific journals and generating novel molecular compounds Windows Goes Agentic - Microsoft announces MCP protocol integration into Windows, raising both excitement about AI capabilities and concerns about data security Gaming Industry Consolidation - FTC finally drops its challenge to Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition after three years of failed legal battles Meta's Monopoly Defense Strategy - Company argues that Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions were beneficial rather than anti-competitive, as antitrust trial concludes Google's Hyper-Realistic AI Videos - Veo 3 generates convincing fake videos that blur the line between reality and AI creation, raising concerns about misinformation Revenge Porn Legislation Concerns - New "Take It Down" Act passes with bipartisan support but raises censorship worries about its 48-hour removal requirements Smart Glasses Make a Comeback - Google announces Android XR partnerships with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster, signaling the return of consumer AR eyewear The $6.5 Billion AI Hardware Gamble - OpenAI's record-breaking acquisition of Jony Ive's design firm sparks debate about whether AI needs dedicated hardware devices Amazon's Smart Speaker Surveillance - Investigation reveals how much personal data Echo devices collect and store, highlighting the privacy costs of convenient AI assistants The Death of CAPTCHAs - AI now solves visual puzzles better than humans, making traditional bot-detection methods obsolete and forcing a rethink of online security America Abandons the Penny - The US will stop minting pennies due to production costs exceeding face value, ending a century-old currency tradition Air Traffic Control Crisis Exposed - Newark Airport's radar failures reveal America's dangerously outdated aviation infrastructure held together by 1990s technology and hope Fortnite's App Store Victory - Epic Games successfully returns to iOS after Apple quickly capitulates under legal pressure, ending years of bitter disputes Brain-Computer Interface Competition - Valve's Gabe Newell announces Neuralink competitor, expanding the race to connect human brains directly to computers Infrared Contact Lenses Enable Night Vision - Researchers develop contacts that let wearers see heat signatures even with eyes closed, promising superhuman vision capabilities 23andMe's Genetic Data Gold Rush - Regeneron Pharmaceuticals acquires the DNA testing company for $256 million, raising questions about genetic privacy and Stolen These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1033 Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, Brian McCullough, and Mike Elgan Sponsors: outsystems.com/twit expressvpn.com/twit spaceship.com/twit uscloud.com storyblok.com/twittv-25

In this jam-packed episode celebrating Towel Day, the TWiT crew dives into Apple's terrible week with Trump's tariff threats, Google and Microsoft's latest AI advances, the death of CAPTCHAs, and some wild new tech including laser-powered smart homes and sock-picking robot vacuums. Trump's Phone Tariff Ultimatum - President threatens 25% tariffs on iPhones and Samsung devices unless manufacturing moves to the US, putting Apple in an impossible position between economics and politics The Sock-Stealing Robot Revolution - Jennifer tests a $2,600 Roborock vacuum with an arm that picks up socks and occasionally tries to grab cats Microsoft's AI Science Breakthrough - Microsoft Build showcases agentic AI platform that helped create new coolant liquids by analyzing scientific journals and generating novel molecular compounds Windows Goes Agentic - Microsoft announces MCP protocol integration into Windows, raising both excitement about AI capabilities and concerns about data security Gaming Industry Consolidation - FTC finally drops its challenge to Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition after three years of failed legal battles Meta's Monopoly Defense Strategy - Company argues that Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions were beneficial rather than anti-competitive, as antitrust trial concludes Google's Hyper-Realistic AI Videos - Veo 3 generates convincing fake videos that blur the line between reality and AI creation, raising concerns about misinformation Revenge Porn Legislation Concerns - New "Take It Down" Act passes with bipartisan support but raises censorship worries about its 48-hour removal requirements Smart Glasses Make a Comeback - Google announces Android XR partnerships with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster, signaling the return of consumer AR eyewear The $6.5 Billion AI Hardware Gamble - OpenAI's record-breaking acquisition of Jony Ive's design firm sparks debate about whether AI needs dedicated hardware devices Amazon's Smart Speaker Surveillance - Investigation reveals how much personal data Echo devices collect and store, highlighting the privacy costs of convenient AI assistants The Death of CAPTCHAs - AI now solves visual puzzles better than humans, making traditional bot-detection methods obsolete and forcing a rethink of online security America Abandons the Penny - The US will stop minting pennies due to production costs exceeding face value, ending a century-old currency tradition Air Traffic Control Crisis Exposed - Newark Airport's radar failures reveal America's dangerously outdated aviation infrastructure held together by 1990s technology and hope Fortnite's App Store Victory - Epic Games successfully returns to iOS after Apple quickly capitulates under legal pressure, ending years of bitter disputes Brain-Computer Interface Competition - Valve's Gabe Newell announces Neuralink competitor, expanding the race to connect human brains directly to computers Infrared Contact Lenses Enable Night Vision - Researchers develop contacts that let wearers see heat signatures even with eyes closed, promising superhuman vision capabilities 23andMe's Genetic Data Gold Rush - Regeneron Pharmaceuticals acquires the DNA testing company for $256 million, raising questions about genetic privacy and Stolen These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1033 Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, Brian McCullough, and Mike Elgan Sponsors: outsystems.com/twit expressvpn.com/twit spaceship.com/twit uscloud.com storyblok.com/twittv-25

In this jam-packed episode celebrating Towel Day, the TWiT crew dives into Apple's terrible week with Trump's tariff threats, Google and Microsoft's latest AI advances, the death of CAPTCHAs, and some wild new tech including laser-powered smart homes and sock-picking robot vacuums. Trump's Phone Tariff Ultimatum - President threatens 25% tariffs on iPhones and Samsung devices unless manufacturing moves to the US, putting Apple in an impossible position between economics and politics The Sock-Stealing Robot Revolution - Jennifer tests a $2,600 Roborock vacuum with an arm that picks up socks and occasionally tries to grab cats Microsoft's AI Science Breakthrough - Microsoft Build showcases agentic AI platform that helped create new coolant liquids by analyzing scientific journals and generating novel molecular compounds Windows Goes Agentic - Microsoft announces MCP protocol integration into Windows, raising both excitement about AI capabilities and concerns about data security Gaming Industry Consolidation - FTC finally drops its challenge to Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition after three years of failed legal battles Meta's Monopoly Defense Strategy - Company argues that Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions were beneficial rather than anti-competitive, as antitrust trial concludes Google's Hyper-Realistic AI Videos - Veo 3 generates convincing fake videos that blur the line between reality and AI creation, raising concerns about misinformation Revenge Porn Legislation Concerns - New "Take It Down" Act passes with bipartisan support but raises censorship worries about its 48-hour removal requirements Smart Glasses Make a Comeback - Google announces Android XR partnerships with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster, signaling the return of consumer AR eyewear The $6.5 Billion AI Hardware Gamble - OpenAI's record-breaking acquisition of Jony Ive's design firm sparks debate about whether AI needs dedicated hardware devices Amazon's Smart Speaker Surveillance - Investigation reveals how much personal data Echo devices collect and store, highlighting the privacy costs of convenient AI assistants The Death of CAPTCHAs - AI now solves visual puzzles better than humans, making traditional bot-detection methods obsolete and forcing a rethink of online security America Abandons the Penny - The US will stop minting pennies due to production costs exceeding face value, ending a century-old currency tradition Air Traffic Control Crisis Exposed - Newark Airport's radar failures reveal America's dangerously outdated aviation infrastructure held together by 1990s technology and hope Fortnite's App Store Victory - Epic Games successfully returns to iOS after Apple quickly capitulates under legal pressure, ending years of bitter disputes Brain-Computer Interface Competition - Valve's Gabe Newell announces Neuralink competitor, expanding the race to connect human brains directly to computers Infrared Contact Lenses Enable Night Vision - Researchers develop contacts that let wearers see heat signatures even with eyes closed, promising superhuman vision capabilities 23andMe's Genetic Data Gold Rush - Regeneron Pharmaceuticals acquires the DNA testing company for $256 million, raising questions about genetic privacy and Stolen These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1033 Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, Brian McCullough, and Mike Elgan Sponsors: outsystems.com/twit expressvpn.com/twit spaceship.com/twit uscloud.com storyblok.com/twittv-25

In this jam-packed episode celebrating Towel Day, the TWiT crew dives into Apple's terrible week with Trump's tariff threats, Google and Microsoft's latest AI advances, the death of CAPTCHAs, and some wild new tech including laser-powered smart homes and sock-picking robot vacuums. Trump's Phone Tariff Ultimatum - President threatens 25% tariffs on iPhones and Samsung devices unless manufacturing moves to the US, putting Apple in an impossible position between economics and politics The Sock-Stealing Robot Revolution - Jennifer tests a $2,600 Roborock vacuum with an arm that picks up socks and occasionally tries to grab cats Microsoft's AI Science Breakthrough - Microsoft Build showcases agentic AI platform that helped create new coolant liquids by analyzing scientific journals and generating novel molecular compounds Windows Goes Agentic - Microsoft announces MCP protocol integration into Windows, raising both excitement about AI capabilities and concerns about data security Gaming Industry Consolidation - FTC finally drops its challenge to Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition after three years of failed legal battles Meta's Monopoly Defense Strategy - Company argues that Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions were beneficial rather than anti-competitive, as antitrust trial concludes Google's Hyper-Realistic AI Videos - Veo 3 generates convincing fake videos that blur the line between reality and AI creation, raising concerns about misinformation Revenge Porn Legislation Concerns - New "Take It Down" Act passes with bipartisan support but raises censorship worries about its 48-hour removal requirements Smart Glasses Make a Comeback - Google announces Android XR partnerships with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster, signaling the return of consumer AR eyewear The $6.5 Billion AI Hardware Gamble - OpenAI's record-breaking acquisition of Jony Ive's design firm sparks debate about whether AI needs dedicated hardware devices Amazon's Smart Speaker Surveillance - Investigation reveals how much personal data Echo devices collect and store, highlighting the privacy costs of convenient AI assistants The Death of CAPTCHAs - AI now solves visual puzzles better than humans, making traditional bot-detection methods obsolete and forcing a rethink of online security America Abandons the Penny - The US will stop minting pennies due to production costs exceeding face value, ending a century-old currency tradition Air Traffic Control Crisis Exposed - Newark Airport's radar failures reveal America's dangerously outdated aviation infrastructure held together by 1990s technology and hope Fortnite's App Store Victory - Epic Games successfully returns to iOS after Apple quickly capitulates under legal pressure, ending years of bitter disputes Brain-Computer Interface Competition - Valve's Gabe Newell announces Neuralink competitor, expanding the race to connect human brains directly to computers Infrared Contact Lenses Enable Night Vision - Researchers develop contacts that let wearers see heat signatures even with eyes closed, promising superhuman vision capabilities 23andMe's Genetic Data Gold Rush - Regeneron Pharmaceuticals acquires the DNA testing company for $256 million, raising questions about genetic privacy and Stolen These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1033 Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, Brian McCullough, and Mike Elgan Sponsors: outsystems.com/twit expressvpn.com/twit spaceship.com/twit uscloud.com storyblok.com/twittv-25

In this jam-packed episode celebrating Towel Day, the TWiT crew dives into Apple's terrible week with Trump's tariff threats, Google and Microsoft's latest AI advances, the death of CAPTCHAs, and some wild new tech including laser-powered smart homes and sock-picking robot vacuums. Trump's Phone Tariff Ultimatum - President threatens 25% tariffs on iPhones and Samsung devices unless manufacturing moves to the US, putting Apple in an impossible position between economics and politics The Sock-Stealing Robot Revolution - Jennifer tests a $2,600 Roborock vacuum with an arm that picks up socks and occasionally tries to grab cats Microsoft's AI Science Breakthrough - Microsoft Build showcases agentic AI platform that helped create new coolant liquids by analyzing scientific journals and generating novel molecular compounds Windows Goes Agentic - Microsoft announces MCP protocol integration into Windows, raising both excitement about AI capabilities and concerns about data security Gaming Industry Consolidation - FTC finally drops its challenge to Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition after three years of failed legal battles Meta's Monopoly Defense Strategy - Company argues that Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions were beneficial rather than anti-competitive, as antitrust trial concludes Google's Hyper-Realistic AI Videos - Veo 3 generates convincing fake videos that blur the line between reality and AI creation, raising concerns about misinformation Revenge Porn Legislation Concerns - New "Take It Down" Act passes with bipartisan support but raises censorship worries about its 48-hour removal requirements Smart Glasses Make a Comeback - Google announces Android XR partnerships with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster, signaling the return of consumer AR eyewear The $6.5 Billion AI Hardware Gamble - OpenAI's record-breaking acquisition of Jony Ive's design firm sparks debate about whether AI needs dedicated hardware devices Amazon's Smart Speaker Surveillance - Investigation reveals how much personal data Echo devices collect and store, highlighting the privacy costs of convenient AI assistants The Death of CAPTCHAs - AI now solves visual puzzles better than humans, making traditional bot-detection methods obsolete and forcing a rethink of online security America Abandons the Penny - The US will stop minting pennies due to production costs exceeding face value, ending a century-old currency tradition Air Traffic Control Crisis Exposed - Newark Airport's radar failures reveal America's dangerously outdated aviation infrastructure held together by 1990s technology and hope Fortnite's App Store Victory - Epic Games successfully returns to iOS after Apple quickly capitulates under legal pressure, ending years of bitter disputes Brain-Computer Interface Competition - Valve's Gabe Newell announces Neuralink competitor, expanding the race to connect human brains directly to computers Infrared Contact Lenses Enable Night Vision - Researchers develop contacts that let wearers see heat signatures even with eyes closed, promising superhuman vision capabilities 23andMe's Genetic Data Gold Rush - Regeneron Pharmaceuticals acquires the DNA testing company for $256 million, raising questions about genetic privacy and Stolen These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1033 Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, Brian McCullough, and Mike Elgan Sponsors: outsystems.com/twit expressvpn.com/twit spaceship.com/twit uscloud.com storyblok.com/twittv-25

Welcome to a podcast that some have called, "15th best".   We've got RTX PRO 6000, MSI done with Radeon, 200k sold from AMD (no), and even fake CAPTCHAs!  There's so much variety packed in here, it's probably leaking off your screen right now because one window cannot possibly hold it all!One again we are very pleased to welcome back Incogni as a sponsor!Your information is being exposed by data brokers to possible identity theft, scams, online harassment, stalking or even unwanted marketing.Take your personal data back with Incogni!  Use code PCPERSPECTIVE at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan:https://incogni.com/pcperspectiveTimestamps:00:00 Intro02:13 Food with Josh (or not)02:56 NVIDIA had so many announcements at GTC12:34 AMD responds to report that AMD sold nearly 200k RX 9070 GPUs14:55 MSI confirmed that it won't make any RX 9070 cards16:32 Qualcomm will save us all with mobile GPUs18:24 Microsoft deletes Copilot - then says it was a mistake21:28 Roku adds ads (and loses users?)24:51 Windows 11 hates printers almost as much as you do29:01 Arm is getting into super resolution31:06 Podcast sponsor: Incogni32:31 (In)Security Corner44:50 Josh presents some late breaking news47:10 Gaming Quick Hits53:00 Samsung 9100 PRO review1:01:04 Picks of the Week1:08:40 Outro ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Today's episode is with Paul Klein, founder of Browserbase. We talked about building browser infrastructure for AI agents, the future of agent authentication, and their open source framework Stagehand.* [00:00:00] Introductions* [00:04:46] AI-specific challenges in browser infrastructure* [00:07:05] Multimodality in AI-Powered Browsing* [00:12:26] Running headless browsers at scale* [00:18:46] Geolocation when proxying* [00:21:25] CAPTCHAs and Agent Auth* [00:28:21] Building “User take over” functionality* [00:33:43] Stagehand: AI web browsing framework* [00:38:58] OpenAI's Operator and computer use agents* [00:44:44] Surprising use cases of Browserbase* [00:47:18] Future of browser automation and market competition* [00:53:11] Being a solo founderTranscriptAlessio [00:00:04]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, founder of Smol.ai.swyx [00:00:12]: Hey, and today we are very blessed to have our friends, Paul Klein, for the fourth, the fourth, CEO of Browserbase. Welcome.Paul [00:00:21]: Thanks guys. Yeah, I'm happy to be here. I've been lucky to know both of you for like a couple of years now, I think. So it's just like we're hanging out, you know, with three ginormous microphones in front of our face. It's totally normal hangout.swyx [00:00:34]: Yeah. We've actually mentioned you on the podcast, I think, more often than any other Solaris tenant. Just because like you're one of the, you know, best performing, I think, LLM tool companies that have started up in the last couple of years.Paul [00:00:50]: Yeah, I mean, it's been a whirlwind of a year, like Browserbase is actually pretty close to our first birthday. So we are one years old. And going from, you know, starting a company as a solo founder to... To, you know, having a team of 20 people, you know, a series A, but also being able to support hundreds of AI companies that are building AI applications that go out and automate the web. It's just been like, really cool. It's been happening a little too fast. I think like collectively as an AI industry, let's just take a week off together. I took my first vacation actually two weeks ago, and Operator came out on the first day, and then a week later, DeepSeat came out. And I'm like on vacation trying to chill. I'm like, we got to build with this stuff, right? So it's been a breakneck year. But I'm super happy to be here and like talk more about all the stuff we're seeing. And I'd love to hear kind of what you guys are excited about too, and share with it, you know?swyx [00:01:39]: Where to start? So people, you've done a bunch of podcasts. I think I strongly recommend Jack Bridger's Scaling DevTools, as well as Turner Novak's The Peel. And, you know, I'm sure there's others. So you covered your Twilio story in the past, talked about StreamClub, you got acquired to Mux, and then you left to start Browserbase. So maybe we just start with what is Browserbase? Yeah.Paul [00:02:02]: Browserbase is the web browser for your AI. We're building headless browser infrastructure, which are browsers that run in a server environment that's accessible to developers via APIs and SDKs. It's really hard to run a web browser in the cloud. You guys are probably running Chrome on your computers, and that's using a lot of resources, right? So if you want to run a web browser or thousands of web browsers, you can't just spin up a bunch of lambdas. You actually need to use a secure containerized environment. You have to scale it up and down. It's a stateful system. And that infrastructure is, like, super painful. And I know that firsthand, because at my last company, StreamClub, I was CTO, and I was building our own internal headless browser infrastructure. That's actually why we sold the company, is because Mux really wanted to buy our headless browser infrastructure that we'd built. And it's just a super hard problem. And I actually told my co-founders, I would never start another company unless it was a browser infrastructure company. And it turns out that's really necessary in the age of AI, when AI can actually go out and interact with websites, click on buttons, fill in forms. You need AI to do all of that work in an actual browser running somewhere on a server. And BrowserBase powers that.swyx [00:03:08]: While you're talking about it, it occurred to me, not that you're going to be acquired or anything, but it occurred to me that it would be really funny if you became the Nikita Beer of headless browser companies. You just have one trick, and you make browser companies that get acquired.Paul [00:03:23]: I truly do only have one trick. I'm screwed if it's not for headless browsers. I'm not a Go programmer. You know, I'm in AI grant. You know, browsers is an AI grant. But we were the only company in that AI grant batch that used zero dollars on AI spend. You know, we're purely an infrastructure company. So as much as people want to ask me about reinforcement learning, I might not be the best guy to talk about that. But if you want to ask about headless browser infrastructure at scale, I can talk your ear off. So that's really my area of expertise. And it's a pretty niche thing. Like, nobody has done what we're doing at scale before. So we're happy to be the experts.swyx [00:03:59]: You do have an AI thing, stagehand. We can talk about the sort of core of browser-based first, and then maybe stagehand. Yeah, stagehand is kind of the web browsing framework. Yeah.What is Browserbase? Headless Browser Infrastructure ExplainedAlessio [00:04:10]: Yeah. Yeah. And maybe how you got to browser-based and what problems you saw. So one of the first things I worked on as a software engineer was integration testing. Sauce Labs was kind of like the main thing at the time. And then we had Selenium, we had Playbrite, we had all these different browser things. But it's always been super hard to do. So obviously you've worked on this before. When you started browser-based, what were the challenges? What were the AI-specific challenges that you saw versus, there's kind of like all the usual running browser at scale in the cloud, which has been a problem for years. What are like the AI unique things that you saw that like traditional purchase just didn't cover? Yeah.AI-specific challenges in browser infrastructurePaul [00:04:46]: First and foremost, I think back to like the first thing I did as a developer, like as a kid when I was writing code, I wanted to write code that did stuff for me. You know, I wanted to write code to automate my life. And I do that probably by using curl or beautiful soup to fetch data from a web browser. And I think I still do that now that I'm in the cloud. And the other thing that I think is a huge challenge for me is that you can't just create a web site and parse that data. And we all know that now like, you know, taking HTML and plugging that into an LLM, you can extract insights, you can summarize. So it was very clear that now like dynamic web scraping became very possible with the rise of large language models or a lot easier. And that was like a clear reason why there's been more usage of headless browsers, which are necessary because a lot of modern websites don't expose all of their page content via a simple HTTP request. You know, they actually do require you to run this type of code for a specific time. JavaScript on the page to hydrate this. Airbnb is a great example. You go to airbnb.com. A lot of that content on the page isn't there until after they run the initial hydration. So you can't just scrape it with a curl. You need to have some JavaScript run. And a browser is that JavaScript engine that's going to actually run all those requests on the page. So web data retrieval was definitely one driver of starting BrowserBase and the rise of being able to summarize that within LLM. Also, I was familiar with if I wanted to automate a website, I could write one script and that would work for one website. It was very static and deterministic. But the web is non-deterministic. The web is always changing. And until we had LLMs, there was no way to write scripts that you could write once that would run on any website. That would change with the structure of the website. Click the login button. It could mean something different on many different websites. And LLMs allow us to generate code on the fly to actually control that. So I think that rise of writing the generic automation scripts that can work on many different websites, to me, made it clear that browsers are going to be a lot more useful because now you can automate a lot more things without writing. If you wanted to write a script to book a demo call on 100 websites, previously, you had to write 100 scripts. Now you write one script that uses LLMs to generate that script. That's why we built our web browsing framework, StageHand, which does a lot of that work for you. But those two things, web data collection and then enhanced automation of many different websites, it just felt like big drivers for more browser infrastructure that would be required to power these kinds of features.Alessio [00:07:05]: And was multimodality also a big thing?Paul [00:07:08]: Now you can use the LLMs to look, even though the text in the dome might not be as friendly. Maybe my hot take is I was always kind of like, I didn't think vision would be as big of a driver. For UI automation, I felt like, you know, HTML is structured text and large language models are good with structured text. But it's clear that these computer use models are often vision driven, and they've been really pushing things forward. So definitely being multimodal, like rendering the page is required to take a screenshot to give that to a computer use model to take actions on a website. And it's just another win for browser. But I'll be honest, that wasn't what I was thinking early on. I didn't even think that we'd get here so fast with multimodality. I think we're going to have to get back to multimodal and vision models.swyx [00:07:50]: This is one of those things where I forgot to mention in my intro that I'm an investor in Browserbase. And I remember that when you pitched to me, like a lot of the stuff that we have today, we like wasn't on the original conversation. But I did have my original thesis was something that we've talked about on the podcast before, which is take the GPT store, the custom GPT store, all the every single checkbox and plugin is effectively a startup. And this was the browser one. I think the main hesitation, I think I actually took a while to get back to you. The main hesitation was that there were others. Like you're not the first hit list browser startup. It's not even your first hit list browser startup. There's always a question of like, will you be the category winner in a place where there's a bunch of incumbents, to be honest, that are bigger than you? They're just not targeted at the AI space. They don't have the backing of Nat Friedman. And there's a bunch of like, you're here in Silicon Valley. They're not. I don't know.Paul [00:08:47]: I don't know if that's, that was it, but like, there was a, yeah, I mean, like, I think I tried all the other ones and I was like, really disappointed. Like my background is from working at great developer tools, companies, and nothing had like the Vercel like experience. Um, like our biggest competitor actually is partly owned by private equity and they just jacked up their prices quite a bit. And the dashboard hasn't changed in five years. And I actually used them at my last company and tried them and I was like, oh man, like there really just needs to be something that's like the experience of these great infrastructure companies, like Stripe, like clerk, like Vercel that I use in love, but oriented towards this kind of like more specific category, which is browser infrastructure, which is really technically complex. Like a lot of stuff can go wrong on the internet when you're running a browser. The internet is very vast. There's a lot of different configurations. Like there's still websites that only work with internet explorer out there. How do you handle that when you're running your own browser infrastructure? These are the problems that we have to think about and solve at BrowserBase. And it's, it's certainly a labor of love, but I built this for me, first and foremost, I know it's super cheesy and everyone says that for like their startups, but it really, truly was for me. If you look at like the talks I've done even before BrowserBase, and I'm just like really excited to try and build a category defining infrastructure company. And it's, it's rare to have a new category of infrastructure exists. We're here in the Chroma offices and like, you know, vector databases is a new category of infrastructure. Is it, is it, I mean, we can, we're in their office, so, you know, we can, we can debate that one later. That is one.Multimodality in AI-Powered Browsingswyx [00:10:16]: That's one of the industry debates.Paul [00:10:17]: I guess we go back to the LLMOS talk that Karpathy gave way long ago. And like the browser box was very clearly there and it seemed like the people who were building in this space also agreed that browsers are a core primitive of infrastructure for the LLMOS that's going to exist in the future. And nobody was building something there that I wanted to use. So I had to go build it myself.swyx [00:10:38]: Yeah. I mean, exactly that talk that, that honestly, that diagram, every box is a startup and there's the code box and then there's the. The browser box. I think at some point they will start clashing there. There's always the question of the, are you a point solution or are you the sort of all in one? And I think the point solutions tend to win quickly, but then the only ones have a very tight cohesive experience. Yeah. Let's talk about just the hard problems of browser base you have on your website, which is beautiful. Thank you. Was there an agency that you used for that? Yeah. Herb.paris.Paul [00:11:11]: They're amazing. Herb.paris. Yeah. It's H-E-R-V-E. I highly recommend for developers. Developer tools, founders to work with consumer agencies because they end up building beautiful things and the Parisians know how to build beautiful interfaces. So I got to give prep.swyx [00:11:24]: And chat apps, apparently are, they are very fast. Oh yeah. The Mistral chat. Yeah. Mistral. Yeah.Paul [00:11:31]: Late chat.swyx [00:11:31]: Late chat. And then your videos as well, it was professionally shot, right? The series A video. Yeah.Alessio [00:11:36]: Nico did the videos. He's amazing. Not the initial video that you shot at the new one. First one was Austin.Paul [00:11:41]: Another, another video pretty surprised. But yeah, I mean, like, I think when you think about how you talk about your company. You have to think about the way you present yourself. It's, you know, as a developer, you think you evaluate a company based on like the API reliability and the P 95, but a lot of developers say, is the website good? Is the message clear? Do I like trust this founder? I'm building my whole feature on. So I've tried to nail that as well as like the reliability of the infrastructure. You're right. It's very hard. And there's a lot of kind of foot guns that you run into when running headless browsers at scale. Right.Competing with Existing Headless Browser Solutionsswyx [00:12:10]: So let's pick one. You have eight features here. Seamless integration. Scalability. Fast or speed. Secure. Observable. Stealth. That's interesting. Extensible and developer first. What comes to your mind as like the top two, three hardest ones? Yeah.Running headless browsers at scalePaul [00:12:26]: I think just running headless browsers at scale is like the hardest one. And maybe can I nerd out for a second? Is that okay? I heard this is a technical audience, so I'll talk to the other nerds. Whoa. They were listening. Yeah. They're upset. They're ready. The AGI is angry. Okay. So. So how do you run a browser in the cloud? Let's start with that, right? So let's say you're using a popular browser automation framework like Puppeteer, Playwright, and Selenium. Maybe you've written a code, some code locally on your computer that opens up Google. It finds the search bar and then types in, you know, search for Latent Space and hits the search button. That script works great locally. You can see the little browser open up. You want to take that to production. You want to run the script in a cloud environment. So when your laptop is closed, your browser is doing something. The browser is doing something. Well, I, we use Amazon. You can see the little browser open up. You know, the first thing I'd reach for is probably like some sort of serverless infrastructure. I would probably try and deploy on a Lambda. But Chrome itself is too big to run on a Lambda. It's over 250 megabytes. So you can't easily start it on a Lambda. So you maybe have to use something like Lambda layers to squeeze it in there. Maybe use a different Chromium build that's lighter. And you get it on the Lambda. Great. It works. But it runs super slowly. It's because Lambdas are very like resource limited. They only run like with one vCPU. You can run one process at a time. Remember, Chromium is super beefy. It's barely running on my MacBook Air. I'm still downloading it from a pre-run. Yeah, from the test earlier, right? I'm joking. But it's big, you know? So like Lambda, it just won't work really well. Maybe it'll work, but you need something faster. Your users want something faster. Okay. Well, let's put it on a beefier instance. Let's get an EC2 server running. Let's throw Chromium on there. Great. Okay. I can, that works well with one user. But what if I want to run like 10 Chromium instances, one for each of my users? Okay. Well, I might need two EC2 instances. Maybe 10. All of a sudden, you have multiple EC2 instances. This sounds like a problem for Kubernetes and Docker, right? Now, all of a sudden, you're using ECS or EKS, the Kubernetes or container solutions by Amazon. You're spending up and down containers, and you're spending a whole engineer's time on kind of maintaining this stateful distributed system. Those are some of the worst systems to run because when it's a stateful distributed system, it means that you are bound by the connections to that thing. You have to keep the browser open while someone is working with it, right? That's just a painful architecture to run. And there's all this other little gotchas with Chromium, like Chromium, which is the open source version of Chrome, by the way. You have to install all these fonts. You want emojis working in your browsers because your vision model is looking for the emoji. You need to make sure you have the emoji fonts. You need to make sure you have all the right extensions configured, like, oh, do you want ad blocking? How do you configure that? How do you actually record all these browser sessions? Like it's a headless browser. You can't look at it. So you need to have some sort of observability. Maybe you're recording videos and storing those somewhere. It all kind of adds up to be this just giant monster piece of your project when all you wanted to do was run a lot of browsers in production for this little script to go to google.com and search. And when I see a complex distributed system, I see an opportunity to build a great infrastructure company. And we really abstract that away with Browserbase where our customers can use these existing frameworks, Playwright, Publisher, Selenium, or our own stagehand and connect to our browsers in a serverless-like way. And control them, and then just disconnect when they're done. And they don't have to think about the complex distributed system behind all of that. They just get a browser running anywhere, anytime. Really easy to connect to.swyx [00:15:55]: I'm sure you have questions. My standard question with anything, so essentially you're a serverless browser company, and there's been other serverless things that I'm familiar with in the past, serverless GPUs, serverless website hosting. That's where I come from with Netlify. One question is just like, you promised to spin up thousands of servers. You promised to spin up thousands of browsers in milliseconds. I feel like there's no real solution that does that yet. And I'm just kind of curious how. The only solution I know, which is to kind of keep a kind of warm pool of servers around, which is expensive, but maybe not so expensive because it's just CPUs. So I'm just like, you know. Yeah.Browsers as a Core Primitive in AI InfrastructurePaul [00:16:36]: You nailed it, right? I mean, how do you offer a serverless-like experience with something that is clearly not serverless, right? And the answer is, you need to be able to run... We run many browsers on single nodes. We use Kubernetes at browser base. So we have many pods that are being scheduled. We have to predictably schedule them up or down. Yes, thousands of browsers in milliseconds is the best case scenario. If you hit us with 10,000 requests, you may hit a slower cold start, right? So we've done a lot of work on predictive scaling and being able to kind of route stuff to different regions where we have multiple regions of browser base where we have different pools available. You can also pick the region you want to go to based on like lower latency, round trip, time latency. It's very important with these types of things. There's a lot of requests going over the wire. So for us, like having a VM like Firecracker powering everything under the hood allows us to be super nimble and spin things up or down really quickly with strong multi-tenancy. But in the end, this is like the complex infrastructural challenges that we have to kind of deal with at browser base. And we have a lot more stuff on our roadmap to allow customers to have more levers to pull to exchange, do you want really fast browser startup times or do you want really low costs? And if you're willing to be more flexible on that, we may be able to kind of like work better for your use cases.swyx [00:17:44]: Since you used Firecracker, shouldn't Fargate do that for you or did you have to go lower level than that? We had to go lower level than that.Paul [00:17:51]: I find this a lot with Fargate customers, which is alarming for Fargate. We used to be a giant Fargate customer. Actually, the first version of browser base was ECS and Fargate. And unfortunately, it's a great product. I think we were actually the largest Fargate customer in our region for a little while. No, what? Yeah, seriously. And unfortunately, it's a great product, but I think if you're an infrastructure company, you actually have to have a deeper level of control over these primitives. I think it's the same thing is true with databases. We've used other database providers and I think-swyx [00:18:21]: Yeah, serverless Postgres.Paul [00:18:23]: Shocker. When you're an infrastructure company, you're on the hook if any provider has an outage. And I can't tell my customers like, hey, we went down because so-and-so went down. That's not acceptable. So for us, we've really moved to bringing things internally. It's kind of opposite of what we preach. We tell our customers, don't build this in-house, but then we're like, we build a lot of stuff in-house. But I think it just really depends on what is in the critical path. We try and have deep ownership of that.Alessio [00:18:46]: On the distributed location side, how does that work for the web where you might get sort of different content in different locations, but the customer is expecting, you know, if you're in the US, I'm expecting the US version. But if you're spinning up my browser in France, I might get the French version. Yeah.Paul [00:19:02]: Yeah. That's a good question. Well, generally, like on the localization, there is a thing called locale in the browser. You can set like what your locale is. If you're like in the ENUS browser or not, but some things do IP, IP based routing. And in that case, you may want to have a proxy. Like let's say you're running something in the, in Europe, but you want to make sure you're showing up from the US. You may want to use one of our proxy features so you can turn on proxies to say like, make sure these connections always come from the United States, which is necessary too, because when you're browsing the web, you're coming from like a, you know, data center IP, and that can make things a lot harder to browse web. So we do have kind of like this proxy super network. Yeah. We have a proxy for you based on where you're going, so you can reliably automate the web. But if you get scheduled in Europe, that doesn't happen as much. We try and schedule you as close to, you know, your origin that you're trying to go to. But generally you have control over the regions you can put your browsers in. So you can specify West one or East one or Europe. We only have one region of Europe right now, actually. Yeah.Alessio [00:19:55]: What's harder, the browser or the proxy? I feel like to me, it feels like actually proxying reliably at scale. It's much harder than spending up browsers at scale. I'm curious. It's all hard.Paul [00:20:06]: It's layers of hard, right? Yeah. I think it's different levels of hard. I think the thing with the proxy infrastructure is that we work with many different web proxy providers and some are better than others. Some have good days, some have bad days. And our customers who've built browser infrastructure on their own, they have to go and deal with sketchy actors. Like first they figure out their own browser infrastructure and then they got to go buy a proxy. And it's like you can pay in Bitcoin and it just kind of feels a little sus, right? It's like you're buying drugs when you're trying to get a proxy online. We have like deep relationships with these counterparties. We're able to audit them and say, is this proxy being sourced ethically? Like it's not running on someone's TV somewhere. Is it free range? Yeah. Free range organic proxies, right? Right. We do a level of diligence. We're SOC 2. So we have to understand what is going on here. But then we're able to make sure that like we route around proxy providers not working. There's proxy providers who will just, the proxy will stop working all of a sudden. And then if you don't have redundant proxying on your own browsers, that's hard down for you or you may get some serious impacts there. With us, like we intelligently know, hey, this proxy is not working. Let's go to this one. And you can kind of build a network of multiple providers to really guarantee the best uptime for our customers. Yeah. So you don't own any proxies? We don't own any proxies. You're right. The team has been saying who wants to like take home a little proxy server, but not yet. We're not there yet. You know?swyx [00:21:25]: It's a very mature market. I don't think you should build that yourself. Like you should just be a super customer of them. Yeah. Scraping, I think, is the main use case for that. I guess. Well, that leads us into CAPTCHAs and also off, but let's talk about CAPTCHAs. You had a little spiel that you wanted to talk about CAPTCHA stuff.Challenges of Scaling Browser InfrastructurePaul [00:21:43]: Oh, yeah. I was just, I think a lot of people ask, if you're thinking about proxies, you're thinking about CAPTCHAs too. I think it's the same thing. You can go buy CAPTCHA solvers online, but it's the same buying experience. It's some sketchy website, you have to integrate it. It's not fun to buy these things and you can't really trust that the docs are bad. What Browserbase does is we integrate a bunch of different CAPTCHAs. We do some stuff in-house, but generally we just integrate with a bunch of known vendors and continually monitor and maintain these things and say, is this working or not? Can we route around it or not? These are CAPTCHA solvers. CAPTCHA solvers, yeah. Not CAPTCHA providers, CAPTCHA solvers. Yeah, sorry. CAPTCHA solvers. We really try and make sure all of that works for you. I think as a dev, if I'm buying infrastructure, I want it all to work all the time and it's important for us to provide that experience by making sure everything does work and monitoring it on our own. Yeah. Right now, the world of CAPTCHAs is tricky. I think AI agents in particular are very much ahead of the internet infrastructure. CAPTCHAs are designed to block all types of bots, but there are now good bots and bad bots. I think in the future, CAPTCHAs will be able to identify who a good bot is, hopefully via some sort of KYC. For us, we've been very lucky. We have very little to no known abuse of Browserbase because we really look into who we work with. And for certain types of CAPTCHA solving, we only allow them on certain types of plans because we want to make sure that we can know what people are doing, what their use cases are. And that's really allowed us to try and be an arbiter of good bots, which is our long term goal. I want to build great relationships with people like Cloudflare so we can agree, hey, here are these acceptable bots. We'll identify them for you and make sure we flag when they come to your website. This is a good bot, you know?Alessio [00:23:23]: I see. And Cloudflare said they want to do more of this. So they're going to set by default, if they think you're an AI bot, they're going to reject. I'm curious if you think this is something that is going to be at the browser level or I mean, the DNS level with Cloudflare seems more where it should belong. But I'm curious how you think about it.Paul [00:23:40]: I think the web's going to change. You know, I think that the Internet as we have it right now is going to change. And we all need to just accept that the cat is out of the bag. And instead of kind of like wishing the Internet was like it was in the 2000s, we can have free content line that wouldn't be scraped. It's just it's not going to happen. And instead, we should think about like, one, how can we change? How can we change the models of, you know, information being published online so people can adequately commercialize it? But two, how do we rebuild applications that expect that AI agents are going to log in on their behalf? Those are the things that are going to allow us to kind of like identify good and bad bots. And I think the team at Clerk has been doing a really good job with this on the authentication side. I actually think that auth is the biggest thing that will prevent agents from accessing stuff, not captchas. And I think there will be agent auth in the future. I don't know if it's going to happen from an individual company, but actually authentication providers that have a, you know, hidden login as agent feature, which will then you put in your email, you'll get a push notification, say like, hey, your browser-based agent wants to log into your Airbnb. You can approve that and then the agent can proceed. That really circumvents the need for captchas or logging in as you and sharing your password. I think agent auth is going to be one way we identify good bots going forward. And I think a lot of this captcha solving stuff is really short-term problems as the internet kind of reorients itself around how it's going to work with agents browsing the web, just like people do. Yeah.Managing Distributed Browser Locations and Proxiesswyx [00:24:59]: Stitch recently was on Hacker News for talking about agent experience, AX, which is a thing that Netlify is also trying to clone and coin and talk about. And we've talked about this on our previous episodes before in a sense that I actually think that's like maybe the only part of the tech stack that needs to be kind of reinvented for agents. Everything else can stay the same, CLIs, APIs, whatever. But auth, yeah, we need agent auth. And it's mostly like short-lived, like it should not, it should be a distinct, identity from the human, but paired. I almost think like in the same way that every social network should have your main profile and then your alt accounts or your Finsta, it's almost like, you know, every, every human token should be paired with the agent token and the agent token can go and do stuff on behalf of the human token, but not be presumed to be the human. Yeah.Paul [00:25:48]: It's like, it's, it's actually very similar to OAuth is what I'm thinking. And, you know, Thread from Stitch is an investor, Colin from Clerk, Octaventures, all investors in browser-based because like, I hope they solve this because they'll make browser-based submission more possible. So we don't have to overcome all these hurdles, but I think it will be an OAuth-like flow where an agent will ask to log in as you, you'll approve the scopes. Like it can book an apartment on Airbnb, but it can't like message anybody. And then, you know, the agent will have some sort of like role-based access control within an application. Yeah. I'm excited for that.swyx [00:26:16]: The tricky part is just, there's one, one layer of delegation here, which is like, you're authoring my user's user or something like that. I don't know if that's tricky or not. Does that make sense? Yeah.Paul [00:26:25]: You know, actually at Twilio, I worked on the login identity and access. Management teams, right? So like I built Twilio's login page.swyx [00:26:31]: You were an intern on that team and then you became the lead in two years? Yeah.Paul [00:26:34]: Yeah. I started as an intern in 2016 and then I was the tech lead of that team. How? That's not normal. I didn't have a life. He's not normal. Look at this guy. I didn't have a girlfriend. I just loved my job. I don't know. I applied to 500 internships for my first job and I got rejected from every single one of them except for Twilio and then eventually Amazon. And they took a shot on me and like, I was getting paid money to write code, which was my dream. Yeah. Yeah. I'm very lucky that like this coding thing worked out because I was going to be doing it regardless. And yeah, I was able to kind of spend a lot of time on a team that was growing at a company that was growing. So it informed a lot of this stuff here. I think these are problems that have been solved with like the SAML protocol with SSO. I think it's a really interesting stuff with like WebAuthn, like these different types of authentication, like schemes that you can use to authenticate people. The tooling is all there. It just needs to be tweaked a little bit to work for agents. And I think the fact that there are companies that are already. Providing authentication as a service really sets it up. Well, the thing that's hard is like reinventing the internet for agents. We don't want to rebuild the internet. That's an impossible task. And I think people often say like, well, we'll have this second layer of APIs built for agents. I'm like, we will for the top use cases, but instead of we can just tweak the internet as is, which is on the authentication side, I think we're going to be the dumb ones going forward. Unfortunately, I think AI is going to be able to do a lot of the tasks that we do online, which means that it will be able to go to websites, click buttons on our behalf and log in on our behalf too. So with this kind of like web agent future happening, I think with some small structural changes, like you said, it feels like it could all slot in really nicely with the existing internet.Handling CAPTCHAs and Agent Authenticationswyx [00:28:08]: There's one more thing, which is the, your live view iframe, which lets you take, take control. Yeah. Obviously very key for operator now, but like, was, is there anything interesting technically there or that the people like, well, people always want this.Paul [00:28:21]: It was really hard to build, you know, like, so, okay. Headless browsers, you don't see them, right. They're running. They're running in a cloud somewhere. You can't like look at them. And I just want to really make, it's a weird name. I wish we came up with a better name for this thing, but you can't see them. Right. But customers don't trust AI agents, right. At least the first pass. So what we do with our live view is that, you know, when you use browser base, you can actually embed a live view of the browser running in the cloud for your customer to see it working. And that's what the first reason is the build trust, like, okay, so I have this script. That's going to go automate a website. I can embed it into my web application via an iframe and my customer can watch. I think. And then we added two way communication. So now not only can you watch the browser kind of being operated by AI, if you want to pause and actually click around type within this iframe that's controlling a browser, that's also possible. And this is all thanks to some of the lower level protocol, which is called the Chrome DevTools protocol. It has a API called start screencast, and you can also send mouse clicks and button clicks to a remote browser. And this is all embeddable within iframes. You have a browser within a browser, yo. And then you simulate the screen, the click on the other side. Exactly. And this is really nice often for, like, let's say, a capture that can't be solved. You saw this with Operator, you know, Operator actually uses a different approach. They use VNC. So, you know, you're able to see, like, you're seeing the whole window here. What we're doing is something a little lower level with the Chrome DevTools protocol. It's just PNGs being streamed over the wire. But the same thing is true, right? Like, hey, I'm running a window. Pause. Can you do something in this window? Human. Okay, great. Resume. Like sometimes 2FA tokens. Like if you get that text message, you might need a person to type that in. Web agents need human-in-the-loop type workflows still. You still need a person to interact with the browser. And building a UI to proxy that is kind of hard. You may as well just show them the whole browser and say, hey, can you finish this up for me? And then let the AI proceed on afterwards. Is there a future where I stream my current desktop to browser base? I don't think so. I think we're very much cloud infrastructure. Yeah. You know, but I think a lot of the stuff we're doing, we do want to, like, build tools. Like, you know, we'll talk about the stage and, you know, web agent framework in a second. But, like, there's a case where a lot of people are going desktop first for, you know, consumer use. And I think cloud is doing a lot of this, where I expect to see, you know, MCPs really oriented around the cloud desktop app for a reason, right? Like, I think a lot of these tools are going to run on your computer because it makes... I think it's breaking out. People are putting it on a server. Oh, really? Okay. Well, sweet. We'll see. We'll see that. I was surprised, though, wasn't I? I think that the browser company, too, with Dia Browser, it runs on your machine. You know, it's going to be...swyx [00:30:50]: What is it?Paul [00:30:51]: So, Dia Browser, as far as I understand... I used to use Arc. Yeah. I haven't used Arc. But I'm a big fan of the browser company. I think they're doing a lot of cool stuff in consumer. As far as I understand, it's a browser where you have a sidebar where you can, like, chat with it and it can control the local browser on your machine. So, if you imagine, like, what a consumer web agent is, which it lives alongside your browser, I think Google Chrome has Project Marina, I think. I almost call it Project Marinara for some reason. I don't know why. It's...swyx [00:31:17]: No, I think it's someone really likes the Waterworld. Oh, I see. The classic Kevin Costner. Yeah.Paul [00:31:22]: Okay. Project Marinara is a similar thing to the Dia Browser, in my mind, as far as I understand it. You have a browser that has an AI interface that will take over your mouse and keyboard and control the browser for you. Great for consumer use cases. But if you're building applications that rely on a browser and it's more part of a greater, like, AI app experience, you probably need something that's more like infrastructure, not a consumer app.swyx [00:31:44]: Just because I have explored a little bit in this area, do people want branching? So, I have the state. Of whatever my browser's in. And then I want, like, 100 clones of this state. Do people do that? Or...Paul [00:31:56]: People don't do it currently. Yeah. But it's definitely something we're thinking about. I think the idea of forking a browser is really cool. Technically, kind of hard. We're starting to see this in code execution, where people are, like, forking some, like, code execution, like, processes or forking some tool calls or branching tool calls. Haven't seen it at the browser level yet. But it makes sense. Like, if an AI agent is, like, using a website and it's not sure what path it wants to take to crawl this website. To find the information it's looking for. It would make sense for it to explore both paths in parallel. And that'd be a very, like... A road not taken. Yeah. And hopefully find the right answer. And then say, okay, this was actually the right one. And memorize that. And go there in the future. On the roadmap. For sure. Don't make my roadmap, please. You know?Alessio [00:32:37]: How do you actually do that? Yeah. How do you fork? I feel like the browser is so stateful for so many things.swyx [00:32:42]: Serialize the state. Restore the state. I don't know.Paul [00:32:44]: So, it's one of the reasons why we haven't done it yet. It's hard. You know? Like, to truly fork, it's actually quite difficult. The naive way is to open the same page in a new tab and then, like, hope that it's at the same thing. But if you have a form halfway filled, you may have to, like, take the whole, you know, container. Pause it. All the memory. Duplicate it. Restart it from there. It could be very slow. So, we haven't found a thing. Like, the easy thing to fork is just, like, copy the page object. You know? But I think there needs to be something a little bit more robust there. Yeah.swyx [00:33:12]: So, MorphLabs has this infinite branch thing. Like, wrote a custom fork of Linux or something that let them save the system state and clone it. MorphLabs, hit me up. I'll be a customer. Yeah. That's the only. I think that's the only way to do it. Yeah. Like, unless Chrome has some special API for you. Yeah.Paul [00:33:29]: There's probably something we'll reverse engineer one day. I don't know. Yeah.Alessio [00:33:32]: Let's talk about StageHand, the AI web browsing framework. You have three core components, Observe, Extract, and Act. Pretty clean landing page. What was the idea behind making a framework? Yeah.Stagehand: AI web browsing frameworkPaul [00:33:43]: So, there's three frameworks that are very popular or already exist, right? Puppeteer, Playwright, Selenium. Those are for building hard-coded scripts to control websites. And as soon as I started to play with LLMs plus browsing, I caught myself, you know, code-genning Playwright code to control a website. I would, like, take the DOM. I'd pass it to an LLM. I'd say, can you generate the Playwright code to click the appropriate button here? And it would do that. And I was like, this really should be part of the frameworks themselves. And I became really obsessed with SDKs that take natural language as part of, like, the API input. And that's what StageHand is. StageHand exposes three APIs, and it's a super set of Playwright. So, if you go to a page, you may want to take an action, click on the button, fill in the form, etc. That's what the act command is for. You may want to extract some data. This one takes a natural language, like, extract the winner of the Super Bowl from this page. You can give it a Zod schema, so it returns a structured output. And then maybe you're building an API. You can do an agent loop, and you want to kind of see what actions are possible on this page before taking one. You can do observe. So, you can observe the actions on the page, and it will generate a list of actions. You can guide it, like, give me actions on this page related to buying an item. And you can, like, buy it now, add to cart, view shipping options, and pass that to an LLM, an agent loop, to say, what's the appropriate action given this high-level goal? So, StageHand isn't a web agent. It's a framework for building web agents. And we think that agent loops are actually pretty close to the application layer because every application probably has different goals or different ways it wants to take steps. I don't think I've seen a generic. Maybe you guys are the experts here. I haven't seen, like, a really good AI agent framework here. Everyone kind of has their own special sauce, right? I see a lot of developers building their own agent loops, and they're using tools. And I view StageHand as the browser tool. So, we expose act, extract, observe. Your agent can call these tools. And from that, you don't have to worry about it. You don't have to worry about generating playwright code performantly. You don't have to worry about running it. You can kind of just integrate these three tool calls into your agent loop and reliably automate the web.swyx [00:35:48]: A special shout-out to Anirudh, who I met at your dinner, who I think listens to the pod. Yeah. Hey, Anirudh.Paul [00:35:54]: Anirudh's a man. He's a StageHand guy.swyx [00:35:56]: I mean, the interesting thing about each of these APIs is they're kind of each startup. Like, specifically extract, you know, Firecrawler is extract. There's, like, Expand AI. There's a whole bunch of, like, extract companies. They just focus on extract. I'm curious. Like, I feel like you guys are going to collide at some point. Like, right now, it's friendly. Everyone's in a blue ocean. At some point, it's going to be valuable enough that there's some turf battle here. I don't think you have a dog in a fight. I think you can mock extract to use an external service if they're better at it than you. But it's just an observation that, like, in the same way that I see each option, each checkbox in the side of custom GBTs becoming a startup or each box in the Karpathy chart being a startup. Like, this is also becoming a thing. Yeah.Paul [00:36:41]: I mean, like, so the way StageHand works is that it's MIT-licensed, completely open source. You bring your own API key to your LLM of choice. You could choose your LLM. We don't make any money off of the extract or really. We only really make money if you choose to run it with our browser. You don't have to. You can actually use your own browser, a local browser. You know, StageHand is completely open source for that reason. And, yeah, like, I think if you're building really complex web scraping workflows, I don't know if StageHand is the tool for you. I think it's really more if you're building an AI agent that needs a few general tools or if it's doing a lot of, like, web automation-intensive work. But if you're building a scraping company, StageHand is not your thing. You probably want something that's going to, like, get HTML content, you know, convert that to Markdown, query it. That's not what StageHand does. StageHand is more about reliability. I think we focus a lot on reliability and less so on cost optimization and speed at this point.swyx [00:37:33]: I actually feel like StageHand, so the way that StageHand works, it's like, you know, page.act, click on the quick start. Yeah. It's kind of the integration test for the code that you would have to write anyway, like the Puppeteer code that you have to write anyway. And when the page structure changes, because it always does, then this is still the test. This is still the test that I would have to write. Yeah. So it's kind of like a testing framework that doesn't need implementation detail.Paul [00:37:56]: Well, yeah. I mean, Puppeteer, Playwright, and Slenderman were all designed as testing frameworks, right? Yeah. And now people are, like, hacking them together to automate the web. I would say, and, like, maybe this is, like, me being too specific. But, like, when I write tests, if the page structure changes. Without me knowing, I want that test to fail. So I don't know if, like, AI, like, regenerating that. Like, people are using StageHand for testing. But it's more for, like, usability testing, not, like, testing of, like, does the front end, like, has it changed or not. Okay. But generally where we've seen people, like, really, like, take off is, like, if they're using, you know, something. If they want to build a feature in their application that's kind of like Operator or Deep Research, they're using StageHand to kind of power that tool calling in their own agent loop. Okay. Cool.swyx [00:38:37]: So let's go into Operator, the first big agent launch of the year from OpenAI. Seems like they have a whole bunch scheduled. You were on break and your phone blew up. What's your just general view of computer use agents is what they're calling it. The overall category before we go into Open Operator, just the overall promise of Operator. I will observe that I tried it once. It was okay. And I never tried it again.OpenAI's Operator and computer use agentsPaul [00:38:58]: That tracks with my experience, too. Like, I'm a huge fan of the OpenAI team. Like, I think that I do not view Operator as the company. I'm not a company killer for browser base at all. I think it actually shows people what's possible. I think, like, computer use models make a lot of sense. And I'm actually most excited about computer use models is, like, their ability to, like, really take screenshots and reasoning and output steps. I think that using mouse click or mouse coordinates, I've seen that proved to be less reliable than I would like. And I just wonder if that's the right form factor. What we've done with our framework is anchor it to the DOM itself, anchor it to the actual item. So, like, if it's clicking on something, it's clicking on that thing, you know? Like, it's more accurate. No matter where it is. Yeah, exactly. Because it really ties in nicely. And it can handle, like, the whole viewport in one go, whereas, like, Operator can only handle what it sees. Can you hover? Is hovering a thing that you can do? I don't know if we expose it as a tool directly, but I'm sure there's, like, an API for hovering. Like, move mouse to this position. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you can trigger hover, like, via, like, the JavaScript on the DOM itself. But, no, I think, like, when we saw computer use, everyone's eyes lit up because they realized, like, wow, like, AI is going to actually automate work for people. And I think seeing that kind of happen from both of the labs, and I'm sure we're going to see more labs launch computer use models, I'm excited to see all the stuff that people build with it. I think that I'd love to see computer use power, like, controlling a browser on browser base. And I think, like, Open Operator, which was, like, our open source version of OpenAI's Operator, was our first take on, like, how can we integrate these models into browser base? And we handle the infrastructure and let the labs do the models. I don't have a sense that Operator will be released as an API. I don't know. Maybe it will. I'm curious to see how well that works because I think it's going to be really hard for a company like OpenAI to do things like support CAPTCHA solving or, like, have proxies. Like, I think it's hard for them structurally. Imagine this New York Times headline, OpenAI CAPTCHA solving. Like, that would be a pretty bad headline, this New York Times headline. Browser base solves CAPTCHAs. No one cares. No one cares. And, like, our investors are bored. Like, we're all okay with this, you know? We're building this company knowing that the CAPTCHA solving is short-lived until we figure out how to authenticate good bots. I think it's really hard for a company like OpenAI, who has this brand that's so, so good, to balance with, like, the icky parts of web automation, which it can be kind of complex to solve. I'm sure OpenAI knows who to call whenever they need you. Yeah, right. I'm sure they'll have a great partnership.Alessio [00:41:23]: And is Open Operator just, like, a marketing thing for you? Like, how do you think about resource allocation? So, you can spin this up very quickly. And now there's all this, like, open deep research, just open all these things that people are building. We started it, you know. You're the original Open. We're the original Open operator, you know? Is it just, hey, look, this is a demo, but, like, we'll help you build out an actual product for yourself? Like, are you interested in going more of a product route? That's kind of the OpenAI way, right? They started as a model provider and then…Paul [00:41:53]: Yeah, we're not interested in going the product route yet. I view Open Operator as a model provider. It's a reference project, you know? Let's show people how to build these things using the infrastructure and models that are out there. And that's what it is. It's, like, Open Operator is very simple. It's an agent loop. It says, like, take a high-level goal, break it down into steps, use tool calling to accomplish those steps. It takes screenshots and feeds those screenshots into an LLM with the step to generate the right action. It uses stagehand under the hood to actually execute this action. It doesn't use a computer use model. And it, like, has a nice interface using the live view that we talked about, the iframe, to embed that into an application. So I felt like people on launch day wanted to figure out how to build their own version of this. And we turned that around really quickly to show them. And I hope we do that with other things like deep research. We don't have a deep research launch yet. I think David from AOMNI actually has an amazing open deep research that he launched. It has, like, 10K GitHub stars now. So he's crushing that. But I think if people want to build these features natively into their application, they need good reference projects. And I think Open Operator is a good example of that.swyx [00:42:52]: I don't know. Actually, I'm actually pretty bullish on API-driven operator. Because that's the only way that you can sort of, like, once it's reliable enough, obviously. And now we're nowhere near. But, like, give it five years. It'll happen, you know. And then you can sort of spin this up and browsers are working in the background and you don't necessarily have to know. And it just is booking restaurants for you, whatever. I can definitely see that future happening. I had this on the landing page here. This might be a slightly out of order. But, you know, you have, like, sort of three use cases for browser base. Open Operator. Or this is the operator sort of use case. It's kind of like the workflow automation use case. And it completes with UiPath in the sort of RPA category. Would you agree with that? Yeah, I would agree with that. And then there's Agents we talked about already. And web scraping, which I imagine would be the bulk of your workload right now, right?Paul [00:43:40]: No, not at all. I'd say actually, like, the majority is browser automation. We're kind of expensive for web scraping. Like, I think that if you're building a web scraping product, if you need to do occasional web scraping or you have to do web scraping that works every single time, you want to use browser automation. Yeah. You want to use browser-based. But if you're building web scraping workflows, what you should do is have a waterfall. You should have the first request is a curl to the website. See if you can get it without even using a browser. And then the second request may be, like, a scraping-specific API. There's, like, a thousand scraping APIs out there that you can use to try and get data. Scraping B. Scraping B is a great example, right? Yeah. And then, like, if those two don't work, bring out the heavy hitter. Like, browser-based will 100% work, right? It will load the page in a real browser, hydrate it. I see.swyx [00:44:21]: Because a lot of people don't render to JS.swyx [00:44:25]: Yeah, exactly.Paul [00:44:26]: So, I mean, the three big use cases, right? Like, you know, automation, web data collection, and then, you know, if you're building anything agentic that needs, like, a browser tool, you want to use browser-based.Alessio [00:44:35]: Is there any use case that, like, you were super surprised by that people might not even think about? Oh, yeah. Or is it, yeah, anything that you can share? The long tail is crazy. Yeah.Surprising use cases of BrowserbasePaul [00:44:44]: One of the case studies on our website that I think is the most interesting is this company called Benny. So, the way that it works is if you're on food stamps in the United States, you can actually get rebates if you buy certain things. Yeah. You buy some vegetables. You submit your receipt to the government. They'll give you a little rebate back. Say, hey, thanks for buying vegetables. It's good for you. That process of submitting that receipt is very painful. And the way Benny works is you use their app to take a photo of your receipt, and then Benny will go submit that receipt for you and then deposit the money into your account. That's actually using no AI at all. It's all, like, hard-coded scripts. They maintain the scripts. They've been doing a great job. And they build this amazing consumer app. But it's an example of, like, all these, like, tedious workflows that people have to do to kind of go about their business. And they're doing it for the sake of their day-to-day lives. And I had never known about, like, food stamp rebates or the complex forms you have to do to fill them. But the world is powered by millions and millions of tedious forms, visas. You know, Emirate Lighthouse is a customer, right? You know, they do the O1 visa. Millions and millions of forms are taking away humans' time. And I hope that Browserbase can help power software that automates away the web forms that we don't need anymore. Yeah.swyx [00:45:49]: I mean, I'm very supportive of that. I mean, forms. I do think, like, government itself is a big part of it. I think the government itself should embrace AI more to do more sort of human-friendly form filling. Mm-hmm. But I'm not optimistic. I'm not holding my breath. Yeah. We'll see. Okay. I think I'm about to zoom out. I have a little brief thing on computer use, and then we can talk about founder stuff, which is, I tend to think of developer tooling markets in impossible triangles, where everyone starts in a niche, and then they start to branch out. So I already hinted at a little bit of this, right? We mentioned more. We mentioned E2B. We mentioned Firecrawl. And then there's Browserbase. So there's, like, all this stuff of, like, have serverless virtual computer that you give to an agent and let them do stuff with it. And there's various ways of connecting it to the internet. You can just connect to a search API, like SERP API, whatever other, like, EXA is another one. That's what you're searching. You can also have a JSON markdown extractor, which is Firecrawl. Or you can have a virtual browser like Browserbase, or you can have a virtual machine like Morph. And then there's also maybe, like, a virtual sort of code environment, like Code Interpreter. So, like, there's just, like, a bunch of different ways to tackle the problem of give a computer to an agent. And I'm just kind of wondering if you see, like, everyone's just, like, happily coexisting in their respective niches. And as a developer, I just go and pick, like, a shopping basket of one of each. Or do you think that you eventually, people will collide?Future of browser automation and market competitionPaul [00:47:18]: I think that currently it's not a zero-sum market. Like, I think we're talking about... I think we're talking about all of knowledge work that people do that can be automated online. All of these, like, trillions of hours that happen online where people are working. And I think that there's so much software to be built that, like, I tend not to think about how these companies will collide. I just try to solve the problem as best as I can and make this specific piece of infrastructure, which I think is an important primitive, the best I possibly can. And yeah. I think there's players that are actually going to like it. I think there's players that are going to launch, like, over-the-top, you know, platforms, like agent platforms that have all these tools built in, right? Like, who's building the rippling for agent tools that has the search tool, the browser tool, the operating system tool, right? There are some. There are some. There are some, right? And I think in the end, what I have seen as my time as a developer, and I look at all the favorite tools that I have, is that, like, for tools and primitives with sufficient levels of complexity, you need to have a solution that's really bespoke to that primitive, you know? And I am sufficiently convinced that the browser is complex enough to deserve a primitive. Obviously, I have to. I'm the founder of BrowserBase, right? I'm talking my book. But, like, I think maybe I can give you one spicy take against, like, maybe just whole OS running. I think that when I look at computer use when it first came out, I saw that the majority of use cases for computer use were controlling a browser. And do we really need to run an entire operating system just to control a browser? I don't think so. I don't think that's necessary. You know, BrowserBase can run browsers for way cheaper than you can if you're running a full-fledged OS with a GUI, you know, operating system. And I think that's just an advantage of the browser. It is, like, browsers are little OSs, and you can run them very efficiently if you orchestrate it well. And I think that allows us to offer 90% of the, you know, functionality in the platform needed at 10% of the cost of running a full OS. Yeah.Open Operator: Browserbase's Open-Source Alternativeswyx [00:49:16]: I definitely see the logic in that. There's a Mark Andreessen quote. I don't know if you know this one. Where he basically observed that the browser is turning the operating system into a poorly debugged set of device drivers, because most of the apps are moved from the OS to the browser. So you can just run browsers.Paul [00:49:31]: There's a place for OSs, too. Like, I think that there are some applications that only run on Windows operating systems. And Eric from pig.dev in this upcoming YC batch, or last YC batch, like, he's building all run tons of Windows operating systems for you to control with your agent. And like, there's some legacy EHR systems that only run on Internet-controlled systems. Yeah.Paul [00:49:54]: I think that's it. I think, like, there are use cases for specific operating systems for specific legacy software. And like, I'm excited to see what he does with that. I just wanted to give a shout out to the pig.dev website.swyx [00:50:06]: The pigs jump when you click on them. Yeah. That's great.Paul [00:50:08]: Eric, he's the former co-founder of banana.dev, too.swyx [00:50:11]: Oh, that Eric. Yeah. That Eric. Okay. Well, he abandoned bananas for pigs. I hope he doesn't start going around with pigs now.Alessio [00:50:18]: Like he was going around with bananas. A little toy pig. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. What else are we missing? I think we covered a lot of, like, the browser-based product history, but. What do you wish people asked you? Yeah.Paul [00:50:29]: I wish people asked me more about, like, what will the future of software look like? Because I think that's really where I've spent a lot of time about why do browser-based. Like, for me, starting a company is like a means of last resort. Like, you shouldn't start a company unless you absolutely have to. And I remain convinced that the future of software is software that you're going to click a button and it's going to do stuff on your behalf. Right now, software. You click a button and it maybe, like, calls it back an API and, like, computes some numbers. It, like, modifies some text, whatever. But the future of software is software using software. So, I may log into my accounting website for my business, click a button, and it's going to go load up my Gmail, search my emails, find the thing, upload the receipt, and then comment it for me. Right? And it may use it using APIs, maybe a browser. I don't know. I think it's a little bit of both. But that's completely different from how we've built software so far. And that's. I think that future of software has different infrastructure requirements. It's going to require different UIs. It's going to require different pieces of infrastructure. I think the browser infrastructure is one piece that fits into that, along with all the other categories you mentioned. So, I think that it's going to require developers to think differently about how they've built software for, you know

Episode 214: The hidden horrors of CAPTCHAs, Salt Typhoon finds new entries into US infrastructure, innovations from Mullvad & Kagi, and more!Welcome to the Surveillance Report - featuring Techlore & The New Oil to keep you updated on the newest security & privacy news.

The episode opens with a discussion of DeepSeek's V3 and R1 models, which the hosts describe as highly capable and unusually efficient. They frame the reaction as part of a broader open-source versus closed-source AI debate, while also noting uncertainty and controversy about whether some of DeepSeek's progress came from training on frontier model outputs or distillation. The hosts stress that the technical achievements are real, even if the competitive landscape and provenance are murky. A large portion of the episode is spent reacting to OpenAI's Operator, a browser-controlling agent that can log in, navigate websites, and work inside cloud-hosted browser sessions. The hosts demonstrate and discuss practical uses like Google Docs, Notion, CSV creation, image searching, and meme generation, while also emphasizing that the tool is still slow, brittle, and limited by logins, CAPTCHAs, and permissions. They broaden the conversation into the implications of agentic browsers for workflows, traffic metrics, monetization, access control, and the larger direction of AI development. Key topics Open-source versus closed-source AI competition: The hosts discuss DeepSeek, Meta's Llama models, and OpenAI's releases as part of a fast-moving competition between open and closed AI systems. They describe open source as a major current moment, while also recognizing that frontier commercial labs continue to advance quickly. Model efficiency and distillation: Andrew emphasizes that DeepSeek's

The episode opens with a discussion of DeepSeek's V3 and R1 models, which the hosts describe as highly capable and unusually efficient. They frame the reaction as part of a broader open-source versus closed-source AI debate, while also noting uncertainty and controversy about whether some of DeepSeek's progress came from training on frontier model outputs or distillation. The hosts stress that the technical achievements are real, even if the competitive landscape and provenance are murky. A large portion of the episode is spent reacting to OpenAI's Operator, a browser-controlling agent that can log in, navigate websites, and work inside cloud-hosted browser sessions. The hosts demonstrate and discuss practical uses like Google Docs, Notion, CSV creation, image searching, and meme generation, while also emphasizing that the tool is still slow, brittle, and limited by logins, CAPTCHAs, and permissions. They broaden the conversation into the implications of agentic browsers for workflows, traffic metrics, monetization, access control, and the larger direction of AI development. Key topics Open-source versus closed-source AI competition: The hosts discuss DeepSeek, Meta's Llama models, and OpenAI's releases as part of a fast-moving competition between open and closed AI systems. They describe open source as a major current moment, while also recognizing that frontier commercial labs continue to advance quickly. Model efficiency and distillation: Andrew emphasizes that DeepSeek's

This week on Blurry Hysteria, we're hitting you with a double dose of bizarre! First up, someone decided CAPTCHA wasn't annoying enough and created one where you play Doom on Nightmare difficulty. Can you rip and tear your way to proving you're not a robot? Spoiler: most of us are doomed.Then, we head to Houston, where the police evidence lockers have been infiltrated—not by master thieves, but by junkie rats with a taste for confiscated drugs. Who's the kingpin of the rodent cartel, and do they have a tiny, whiskered Walter White? All that and more this week on Blurry Hysteria!News Stories Mentioned: Doom: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/01/someone-made-a-captcha-where-you-play-doom-on-nightmare-difficulty/Rat Party: https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2025/01/21/Houston-Police-evidence-lockers-drugs-rats/6941737480214/Email us your favorite WEIRD news stories:weird@hysteria51.comSupport the ShowGet exclusive content & perks as well as an ad and sponsor free experience at https://www.patreon.com/Hysteria51 from just $1ShopBe the Best Dressed at your Cult Meeting!https://www.teepublic.com/stores/hysteria51?ref_id=9022 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week on Blurry Hysteria, we're hitting you with a double dose of bizarre! First up, someone decided CAPTCHA wasn't annoying enough and created one where you play Doom on Nightmare difficulty. Can you rip and tear your way to proving you're not a robot? Spoiler: most of us are doomed. Then, we head to Houston, where the police evidence lockers have been infiltrated—not by master thieves, but by junkie rats with a taste for confiscated drugs. Who's the kingpin of the rodent cartel, and do they have a tiny, whiskered Walter White? All that and more this week on Blurry Hysteria! News Stories Mentioned:  Doom: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/01/someone-made-a-captcha-where-you-play-doom-on-nightmare-difficulty/ Rat Party: https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2025/01/21/Houston-Police-evidence-lockers-drugs-rats/6941737480214/ Email us your favorite WEIRD news stories: weird@hysteria51.com Support the Show Get exclusive content & perks as well as an ad and sponsor free experience at https://www.patreon.com/Hysteria51 from just $1 Shop Be the Best Dressed at your Cult Meeting! https://www.teepublic.com/stores/hysteria51?ref_id=9022 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week, we delve into the dark world of fake CAPTCHAs designed to hijack your computer. Plus, the AI safety clock is ticking down – is doomsday closer than we think? And to top it off, we uncover the sticky situation of Krispy Kreme facing a ransomware attack.All this and more is discussed in the latest jam-packed edition of the "Smashing Security" podcast by cybersecurity veterans Graham Cluley and Carole Theriault, joined this week by Mark Stockley of "The AI Fix" podcast.Warning: This podcast may contain nuts, adult themes, and rude language.Episode links:CAPTCHAs from hell - Reddit.“DeceptionAds” — Fake Captcha Driving Infostealer Infections and a Glimpse to the Dark Side of Internet Advertising - Guardio.AI Safety Clock Ticks Closer To ‘Midnight,' Signifying Rising Risk - Forbes.Krispy Kreme admits there's a hole in its security - The Register. Nutritional and Allergen Information - Krispy Kreme. &UDM=14.Does one line fix Google? - Tedium.ElevenLabs.The GCHQ Christmas Challenge 2024 - GCHQ.Smashing Security merchandise (t-shirts, mugs, stickers and stuff)Sponsored by:1Password Extended Access Management – Secure every sign-in for every app on every device.BigID - Start protecting your sensitive data wherever it lives with BigID. Get a free demo to how your organization can reduce data risk and accelerate the adoption of generative AI.ThreatLocker - the Zero Trust endpoint protection platform that provides enterprise-level cybersecurity to organizations globally. Start your 30-day free trial today!SUPPORT THE SHOW:Tell your friends and colleagues about “Smashing Security”, and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser.Become a supporter via Patreon or Apple Podcasts for ad-free episodes and our early-release feed!FOLLOW US:Follow us on

Nachdem wir in der letzten Episode über von den schönen Aspekten der Stadt New York geschwärmt haben, zählen wir diesmal auf, was uns hier nervt. Manuel ist überfordert von der allgegenwärtigen Lautstärke der Stadt, während Cari Probleme mit den Duschköpfen hat. Außerdem sprechen wir über neuartige Captchas im Internet. Und: Manuel hat vom Musical "The Book of Mormon" eine Lektion fürs Leben mitgenommen… Die nächste Episode erscheint reisebedingt am 2. Oktober 2024.   Transkript und Vokabelhilfe Werde ein Easy German Mitglied und du bekommst unsere Vokabelhilfe, ein interaktives Transkript und Bonusmaterial zu jeder Episode: easygerman.org/membership   Das nervt (New York City Edition): Lautstärke & Duschköpfe Geräuschkulisse in New York   Ausdruck der Woche: so einen Hals haben so einen Hals haben (Redensarten-Index) Woher kommt – "Jammern auf hohem Niveau"? (antenne unna)   Das nervt: Captchas werden immer absurder Captcha (Wikipedia)   Das ist schön: Musicals & Umgang mit Beleidigungen The Book of Mormon (Musical) (Wikipedia)   Wichtige Vokabeln in dieser Episode schwärmen: begeistert und positiv über etwas reden bemängeln: Kritik an etwas äußern; Fehler oder Mängel aufzeigen der Duschkopf: Teil der Dusche, aus dem das Wasser kommt das Captcha: Sicherheitsmechanismus zur Überprüfung, ob ein Mensch oder ein automatisiertes Programm auf eine Website zugreift die Abendkasse: Verkaufsstelle für Tickets, die kurz vor Veranstaltungsbeginn geöffnet ist   Support Easy German and get interactive transcripts, live vocabulary and bonus content: easygerman.org/membership

Where did CAPTCHAs come from? What purpose do they serve? How do they relate to artificial intelligence? And why are some of them so doggone hard?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Nikki's dad, EJ, is in the studio. Nikki is not a fan of April Fool's pranks, although her Girl's chat did have a good one. Recently, Nikki lent her expertise to help Anya promote her music, yet she finds herself stumped when it comes to brainstorming marketing ideas for her own endeavors. They take a look at Nikki's IG explore page. Brian helps Nikki come up with a new password to prevent a data breach. Nikki is very much into correcting her 'pelvic tilt'. She has been on a Tom Brady TB12 kick, obsessed with a Noah Kahan song, and wants recommendations for a 1975 playlist. In the Final Thought, EJ shares a story about meeting Ringo Starr. Nikki is reminded of meet and greet pet peeves, and Brian comes in with a solution called the 'Creep Captcha'. . Subscribe to Big Money Players Diamond on Apple Podcasts to get this episode ad-free, and get exclusive bonus content: https://apple.co/nikkiglaserpodcast  Watch this episode on our Youtube Channel: The Nikki Glaser Podcast Follow the pod on Instagram for bonus content: @NikkiGlaserPod Leave us your voicemail: Click Here To Record Nikki's Tour Dates: nikkiglaser.com/tour Brian's Animations: youtube.com/@BrianFrange More Nikki: IG More Brian: IG More producer Noa: IGSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.