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A taxi pulls up with no one in the front seat. Would you get in? We invited Waymo director Nick Pelly to take us from that first uncanny moment to the engineering that makes a driverless ride feel calm, confident and, by the data, far safer than most humans behind the wheel.

We walk through the full autonomy stack in plain English: how cameras, radar and LiDAR fuse into a single view of the world; how perception, prediction and planning work together to thread through double‑parked vans, nudge through gridlock and still behave like a good road citizen. Nick explains why Level 4 autonomy is about design domain as much as capability, why hardware still matters, and how redundancy handles blocked sensors, grime or failures without drama. We dig into machine learning at scale, from training on diverse city data to tens of billions of simulated miles, and how teams tune precision and recall so the car avoids both missed hazards and needless hard braking.

Beyond the ride, we zoom out to the business and the city. Phoenix offered a launchpad to build the marketplace, charging and fleet operations; San Francisco demanded handling a busy city and human‑like judgement; London beckons with dense streets and weather. We explore what happens as adoption grows: fewer parking lots, smoother traffic, motorway platoons, even intersections that need fewer lights when vehicles coordinate. Nick also shares his focus area—reliability and freeway fail‑safes—designing for worst‑case scenarios so the system exits danger gracefully at speed; this episode was recorded a week before Nick and the team announced highway driving!

If you’re curious about autonomous vehicles, safety, AI, urban mobility or just want to know what “robotaxi” really means, this conversation turns buzzwords into something you can picture—and maybe soon, ride. Enjoy the episode, then follow and share the show, and leave a quick review to help us bring you an even bigger season two.

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Ever joined a “Guest Wi‑Fi” that looked legit, rushed through an email on the way to the airport, or reused a password because it was easier? Those small shortcuts are exactly where hacks begin. We open the curtain on how attacks actually work and, more importantly, the simple habits that stop them.

We break down malware in clear terms: old‑school viruses that ride dodgy attachments, worms that replicate on their own, and Trojans disguised as free software. Then we step into the street‑level reality of man‑in‑the‑middle attacks using rogue hotspots, why HTTPS and a reputable VPN matter, and how attackers can read or even alter your traffic if you don’t encrypt. On the application side, we demystify SQL injection with concrete examples and show how basic engineering hygiene prevents catastrophic data leaks.

Credentials get a full audit: why password reuse fuels credential stuffing, how to build unique, strong passphrases with a password manager, and when to choose authenticator apps over SMS to defeat SIM‑swap. We also explore passkeys, the passwordless future that uses cryptography tied to your device and makes phishing far harder. From there, we move into company defences: phishing simulations, penetration testing, red team versus blue team drills, and unglamorous but vital basics like patching and tested backups. A crazy ransomware story reminds us that backups and culture beat panic every time -- and Hugh's friend still has 2.5 Bitcoin from the attack (with a fantastic twist at the end).

Along the way, we talk economics of cyber crime, why you only need to be harder to breach than your peer group, and how ethical hackers and bug bounty programmes improve resilience. Subscribe for more practical tech explainers, share this with someone who needs a security refresh, and leave a quick review so others can find the show. What’s the one security habit you’ll change today?

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A fake contractor calls the help desk, a password gets reset, and suddenly a national retailer has hackers inside. We open the door on the human side of hacking—how believable stories and helpful habits become the first domino—then trace the technical steps that turn a small foothold into a system‑wide crisis.

We walk through the anatomy of the Marks & Spencer breach: social engineering as the entry point, slow‑burn privilege escalation, and the moment attackers reached the Active Directory—the store of who can do what. From there, it’s a short hop to ransomware detonation and double extortion, where every machine is unusable and stolen customer data adds pressure to pay. Along the way, we translate hashing, brute force, and admin access into plain English, and we talk candidly about what detection looks like when it actually works: least privilege that’s enforced, behavioural alerts that catch odd access patterns, and teams empowered to say no.

The hardest lesson lands in recovery. Backups that live on the same network get encrypted or deleted; backups that are never rehearsed don’t restore on time. We break down air‑gapped, immutable backups, how to test restores, and why a clean rebuild is sometimes the only safe path. We also connect this case to higher‑stakes incidents at pipelines and hospitals, showing why attackers chase critical bottlenecks and how zero‑trust identity, MFA, network segmentation, and vendor risk controls blunt that leverage. It’s a story about culture as much as code: small process choices—like verifying contractors—change outcomes.

If this breakdown sharpened your thinking, follow the show, leave a quick review, and share it with a teammate who owns identity, help desk, or backups. Your support gets us to series two—and might just get Hannah to Melbourne.

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