5 hours ago
Episode 270 - Your Car Testified, Your Earbuds Are Next, Hacking Texas Water Plants, Montana's Right-To-Try Law
Welcome to this week's episode of the PEBCAK Podcast! We’ve got four amazing stories this week so sit back, relax, and keep being awesome! Be sure to stick around for our Dad Joke of the Week. (DJOW)
Follow us on Instagram @pebcakpodcast
Please share this podcast with someone you know! It helps us grow the podcast and we really appreciate it!
Simple 6 signup link
Your parked car is now a witness, and Oakland PD showed up with a tow truck to collect its testimony.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/tesla-sentry-mode-police-evidence-19731000.php
- Just past midnight on July 1, 2024, outside the La Quinta Inn near Oakland airport, officers found a man in an RV with stab and gunshot wounds; he later died. In the stall directly opposite sat a gray Tesla belonging to a Canadian tourist with no connection to the case. Officer Kevin Godchaux's affidavit asked a judge to authorize seizing the car so its Sentry Mode footage could be searched under a second warrant. The owner walked up mid-tow and handed over the glovebox USB to get his car back. The Chronicle found OPD pulled this at least three times that summer. No subpoena to Tesla needed; the footage sits on a thumb drive in your glovebox. Defender angle: your parked-car threat model is no longer "catalytic converter." It's seizure of a $50k asset over where you happened to park.
Apple's camera-equipped AirPods are real, and we know because the demo video shipped inside a macOS release candidate.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/17/camera-equipped-airpods-macos-26-7/
- MacRumors dug a promo clip out of the macOS Tahoe 26.7 RC: a man holds up a book so the camera in his AirPods can read the title, and Visual Intelligence offers to save it for later. Codename B790, flagged earlier by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who expects launch as soon as this month's iPhone event. Buried detail: the software nags you when hair covers the lens, so the camera is meant to run continuously. The forum reaction nailed the real issue: the wearer's privacy was never the concern, it's everybody standing near them. Defender angle: "phones in the locker" BYOD policy now has a hole the size of an earbud. SCIFs, clean rooms, trading floors and hospitals need a rewrite before September.
Iran-linked hackers reached the operational tech at water utilities in at least seven states; Washington's answer is a six-month pilot in Texas.
- Project Watershed 250 puts ONCD, EPA, CISA and Texas Cyber Command alongside Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, Reflection AI and Dragos to red-team Texas water utilities at no cost, with National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross and Gov. Abbott pitching it as a national template. The White House insists it isn't a reaction to the 30-plus Minnesota systems that got hit, only that those attacks "reiterated the need." Schiff and Klobuchar want $300M a year through the State Revolving Funds for cyber, plus incident reporting extended to state and locally owned systems now exempt. Dragos CEO Robert Lee keeps pointing at the same soft spot: tiny utilities with no budget and no staff. Defender angle: a joint FBI/NSA/CISA bulletin warns attackers are hitting PLCs with AI-generated exploit scripts dressed up as legitimate monitoring tools. Same old fix list: patch, get it off the internet, kill default creds.
Montana built a legal on-ramp for unapproved drugs, and a dad in a hurry is finding out that "legal" and "available" are different words.
- Kris DeVault's three-year-old son Brody has creatine transporter deficiency, a rare condition that starves the brain and muscles of energy. There is no cure. French biotech Ceres Brain Therapeutics has a nasal spray meant to get creatine past the blockage; it cleared a phase I dosing trial in 48 healthy adults and has never been tested in a CTD patient or a child. Montana's expanded right-to-try now has an Experimental Treatment Review Board about to hear its first two applications. Ceres could apply, but CEO Thomas Joudinaud won't, fearing it poisons his eventual FDA approval. DeVault can't get the FDA to put anything in writing either, so he's eyeing a clinic in Prospera, the private charter city in Roatan, Honduras. Harvard's Aaron Kesselheim has the objection to sit with: phase I proves tolerability at a dose, not safety, and not efficacy.
Dad Joke of the Week (DJOW)
Find the hosts on LinkedIn:
Chris - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chlouie/
No comments yet. Be the first to say something!