Podcast 5-5 by Dongee · November 5, 2026

Transcript

Gabriel: Thursday, November fifth. Welcome. Lina, today I'm starting with angry neighbors.

Lina: Angry with who?

Gabriel: With a building. Picture them announcing they're going to build a data center next to your house. Chips running AI… and gulping power and water.

Lina: Right. And the neighborhood power bill… does it go up?

Gabriel: That's exactly what several communities across the United States asked themselves. And they took it to the ballot box.

Lina: To a vote? Seriously?

Gabriel: Forty-one local ballot measures, in ten states. And the neighbors won… well, in every one but one.

Lina: Forty to one. Not even the worst soccer team loses like that.

Gabriel: Ohio alone had twenty-one. The exception was a tiny town in North Dakota. Everywhere else: bans, moratoriums, brakes.

Lina: So people aren't just arguing about whether AI takes their job anymore…

Gabriel: They're arguing about whether it raises their bill. In a CNBC poll, more than half of voters said these centers weighed on their vote.

Lina: More than half. That's a lot.

Gabriel: And it didn't stay local, either. Candidates who campaigned against them won in Ohio and in Texas. Even Elon Musk wrote that data centers in space are looking more and more appealing.

Lina: Sure — in space, there are no neighbors.

Gabriel: Some read it as a warning: communities don't want to carry the cost of the AI race. Others say these are small local votes, the demand is still there, and the centers will just go somewhere else.

Lina: And you, listening… if they put one next to your house, would you vote yes?

Lina: Gabriel, how much would you pay to browse as if you were sitting inside the White House?

Gabriel: What do you mean, inside the White House?

Lina: On the same connection. As if you were a computer in there.

Gabriel: Well… a lot?

Lina: A few dollars. Someone found out you could.

Gabriel: Okay, tell me.

Lina: The security firm Layer3 Intel detected residential proxy traffic coming out of the network of the U.S. president's office. Services that rent out your connection to strangers, so they browse as if they were you.

Gabriel: And who at the White House signs up to be a proxy?

Lina: Nobody, most likely. These programs come hidden inside free apps. They detected two hundred thirty-six exits in a month, and twenty-eight different services selling that access.

Gabriel: Twenty-eight. Free turns out expensive.

Lina: And in this case, a whole country pays for it. Another firm, Synthient, linked it to a service called Infatica, installed on Windows eleven computers. And its founder… is a Russian businessman whose hosting was used in attacks on election systems in twenty sixteen.

Gabriel: With that résumé, it no longer sounds like an innocent slip.

Lina: Careful — there's no confirmed hack. Nobody has shown access to internal systems. And the White House didn't respond.

Gabriel: Seen calmly, it's a common problem: someone installed an app they shouldn't have.

Lina: Seen up close, it's an open door in the most watched building in the world. And you? Do you know which free apps are on your work computer?

Gabriel: Next. Linux. The system that runs most of the world's servers.

Lina: Including ours.

Gabriel: Including ours. And it's so big that nobody can check every corner. So OpenAI put a team of AI agents on the job.

Lina: And did they find anything?

Gabriel: Nine hundred forty-eight things.

Lina: Nine hundred… what?

Gabriel: Nine hundred forty-eight ways for someone with limited access to become an administrator. The agents found them, confirmed them, and even proposed how to fix them.

Lina: Almost a thousand back doors. How reassuring.

Gabriel: Know how much it cost? Just over a million dollars in AI usage. About thirteen hundred per flaw.

Lina: Is that a lot or a little?

Gabriel: Before, in hacking contests, a single one of these paid twenty thousand.

Lina: So now it's cheaper to find the bug than to fix it.

Gabriel: Exactly. That's why, at the end, a person reviews everything before alerting the Linux maintainers. OpenAI puts it this way: the problem is no longer finding flaws — it's verifying and fixing them in time.

Lina: Poor Linux maintainers. A thousand tasks landing on them at once.

Gabriel: For defense, it's good news, right? Thousands of holes closed before an attacker can use them. But anyone with a million dollars can do the same… and not to fix anything.

Lina: Be honest: does it make you feel safer, or more scared, that an AI knows how to break into a system like that?

Lina: Hey — do you pay for Gemini, Google's AI?

Gabriel: I use a few. Why?

Lina: Because if you pay, you might think your conversations are yours alone. Like a locked diary.

Gabriel: And they're not?

Lina: No. Google's own help page says so. If your activity history is on — and it's on by default — your chats help train the AI. And some of them… are read by human reviewers.

Gabriel: Wait. I pay the subscription, and I also work for them for free.

Lina: Basically. You can turn it off, though.

Gabriel: Fine, then I turn it off and done.

Lina: Here's the catch: if you turn it off, your chats are kept for only seventy-two hours. You lose your history.

Gabriel: So: either you train me, or I forget you.

Lina: Exactly. And chats a person reviews can be kept for up to three years, even if you delete them. Google warns: don't type anything confidential you wouldn't want a reviewer to see.

Gabriel: And that's where someone pastes a client's contract to get a summary.

Lina: Right there. Mind you, the policy isn't new. What's new is that it went viral this week on Hacker News, with hundreds of votes. And it applies to personal accounts; business accounts have different rules.

Gabriel: Some say that if you pay, they should tell you when you sign up.

Lina: And some answer that it's in writing, and everyone decides what they share. Would you check your AI settings today? I'm doing it as soon as we wrap.

Gabriel: Last one. And this one is going to sting for more than a few developers.

Lina: Uh-oh.

Gabriel: Picture opening your favorite tool, the one that lets you put several coding assistants to work at once — Claude Code, Codex, each in its own space… It's called Conductor.

Lina: Like a site foreman for robots.

Gabriel: Nice. Well, overnight, that foreman works for Meta. They bought it.

Lina: For how much?

Gabriel: They didn't say. What we do know: Conductor is no longer accepting new users, and its cloud service shuts down on November twentieth.

Lina: The twentieth? That's in two weeks. Not even a landlord cancels that fast.

Gabriel: The version you install on your computer will keep getting updates until early twenty twenty-seven. And the founder hinted that something new is coming inside Meta.

Lina: Getting acquired is every startup's dream…

Gabriel: And getting shut down is its users' nightmare.

Lina: And was that the only deal of the day?

Gabriel: No. OpenAI also announced it's buying another tool for coding with agents. A sign the fight is no longer just about the best model, but about everything around it.

Lina: From Meta's side, it's buying talent. From the user's side, it's another tool you adopted that disappears.

Gabriel: So the question is: would you trust the way you work to a startup a giant could buy tomorrow?

Gabriel: And that's it for today's episode.

Lina: If a question stuck with you, share it with someone and talk it over.

Gabriel: Tomorrow, five more stories. And I… I'm going to check which free apps I have installed. Before someone browses from my computer as if it were the White House.

Lina: I'll help you delete them. Talk to you tomorrow.