Plutopia News Network

Steven Bellovin: Don’t Get Hacked!

In this Plutopia podcast episode, security researcher and educator Steve Bellovin [https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/] discusses the increasingly centralized and balkanized internet, the practical and social problems with age verification, the limited role of consumer VPNs in an era of widespread encryption, and the history and evolution of cryptography. He also shares advice from his new book Don’t Get Hacked, Protect Yourself at Home [https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/homesec/]: keep software updated, use two-factor authentication—especially on email and financial accounts—and rely on a password manager to avoid password reuse. Steve Bellovin: > I think the most important things you can do are keeping your software up to date and using two-factor authentication. Especially on the most important accounts, and that especially includes your email account. Which other than maybe your bank account is your most important password, most important account, because it’s used to reset all of your other passwords. So two-factor authentication, keeping your software up to date, and, given reality, probably you should use a password manager because you cannot keep track of a hundred or more strong (I’m not fond of that word) different passwords. Password reuse is a much greater sin than a quote weak unquote password. LINKS * Don’t Get Hacked, Protect Yourself at Home [https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/homesec/] * “Netnews: The Original Story” [https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/netnews-hist.pdf] * On the Early Days of Usenet: The Roots of the Cooperative Online Culture [https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/613/534] VIDEO ON YOUTUBE The post Steven Bellovin: Don’t Get Hacked! [https://plutopia.io/steven-bellovin-dont-get-hacked/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].

Deborah Cohen: Bad Influence

Award-winning medical journalist Deborah Cohen joins the Plutopia News Network to discuss her book Bad Influence: How the Internet Hijacked Our Health. [https://bookshop.org/a/52607/9780861549887] Deborah examines how social media algorithms, influencers, podcasts, wellness brands, and AI tools have transformed the way people find and evaluate health information. She argues that online platforms reward certainty, emotion, and personal storytelling over scientific nuance, while commercial incentives increasingly shape what health advice reaches the public. The conversation explores the erosion of trust in traditional institutions, the rise of health influencers and wellness marketing, the promises and pitfalls of patient empowerment, the quantified-self movement, GLP-1 drugs, and the growing role of AI in medicine. Throughout, Cohen emphasizes the challenge of navigating a digital health ecosystem where expertise competes with attention, commercial interests, and algorithmic amplification, leaving patients to determine whom—and what—to trust. Deborah Cohen: > Obviously, you want to sell newspapers — if you’re a mainstream media, you want to get eyeballs on the screens. But this is all monetized on social media. So if you have a video that goes viral, you potentially stand to gain financially. Also, a lot of influencers work with companies for product placement, to advertise products. And there’s a massive market in healthcare. So there was one study that suggested — and this is a couple of years old, it’s a US study — that there’s over 3 million health providers on TikTok alone. So, We’re getting our information from people very much with a commercial incentive to sell. VIDEO ON YOUTUBE: The post Deborah Cohen: Bad Influence [https://plutopia.io/deborah-cohen-bad-influence/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].

Patient Power in the Age of AI

Three longtime patient-empowerment advocates — e-Patient Dave deBronkart, Hugo Campos, and Gilles Frydman — join Plutopia to discuss how AI is transforming participatory medicine by giving patients new tools to understand medical research, manage personal health data, challenge institutional failures, and act with greater agency. They explore the promise and risks of large language models in healthcare, including hallucinated scientific references, poor interoperability, rare-disease knowledge gaps, and the need for patient-directed AI rather than institution-controlled systems. The conversation frames AI not as a replacement for human judgment, but as a cognitive aid that can help patients, caregivers, and communities ask better questions, validate information, and regain power in a broken healthcare system. Gilles Frydman: > How do we find ways to? Help people who are not trained as scientists to get the latest scientific information so that they can get the best care in case they get diagnosed with serious stuff. Hugo Campos: > How much agency do I have, and how much agency? does AI give me? And I put AI in these two different categories that tend to be opposing in terms of agency, which are what I’ve been calling institutional. AI versus patient directed AI. Dave deBronkart: > My best talks have been entirely about the trajectory of empowerment. Not specific to healthcare, but empowerment in general through the last half century and how access to information alters that. LINKS * Society for Participatory Medicine [https://participatorymedicine.org] * Collaborative Healthcare Action Measurement Platform (CHAMP) [https://participatorymedicine.org/champ/] * Gilles Frydman at LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/gillesfrydman/] * Critical AI Health Literacy as Liberation Technology: A New Skill for Patient Empowerment [https://nam.edu/perspectives/critical-ai-health-literacy-as-liberation-technology-a-new-skill-for-patient-empowerment/] by Hugo Campos and Liz Salmi * e-Patient Dave: Democratizing Healthcare [https://www.epatientdave.com/] * Patients Use AI (Substack) [https://patientsuseai.substack.com/] VIDEO FROM OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL: The post Patient Power in the Age of AI [https://plutopia.io/patient-power-in-the-age-of-ai/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].

Plutopia Tribal Chat

In this hosts-only “Plutopians Gone Wild” episode, Jon Lebkowsky, Scoop Sweeney, and Wendy Grossman range freely across early online culture, disaster response, politics, surveillance, AI, advertising, podcasts, and pop culture. They reflect on the early internet’s topic-centered communities, The WELL, AOL, Genie, ham radio, and the cooperative spirit that emerged during crises like the Loma Prieta earthquake, the Southeast Asian tsunami, and Hurricane Katrina, contrasting that with today’s tech-bro bunker mentality and surveillance economy. The conversation moves through Flock license plate readers, Ring doorbells, AI-generated video captions, offshore Chinese data centers, Texas precinct organizing, robocalls, streaming ads, listener-supported media, and podcast sponsorships before veering into favorite shows and films, including Decoding the Gurus, The White Canon, The X-Files, Dune, Star Trek, Nope, and Project Hail Mary. The episode works as a loose, funny, and occasionally cranky Plutopia roundtable about how technology, media, politics, and culture have changed since the dial-up days—and whether any of it still leaves room for community, trust, and good conversation. The post Plutopia Tribal Chat [https://plutopia.io/plutopia-tribal-chat/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].

Cindy Cohn: Privacy’s Defender

Cindy Cohn joins Plutopia to discuss her new book, Privacy’s Defender, [https://bookshop.org/a/52607/9780262051248] and reflects on her decades of work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, [https://www.eff.org/] from the landmark Bernstein encryption case [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States] to fights against NSA [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency] mass surveillance and national security letters. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter#Contentious_aspects] She argues that privacy limits the power of governments, corporations, and individuals, and that winning the battle to free encryption was one of the most important victories for digital civil liberties because it made modern secure communication and online commerce possible. The conversation expands into current threats, including ChatGPT data access by law enforcement, border device searches, Palantir and ICE surveillance, license plate readers, age verification laws, attacks on journalists, and the erosion of legal remedies for rights violations. Cohn emphasizes that technology is always a mixed bag, that social problems cannot simply be solved by blunt internet regulation, and that organizations like EFF help “stress test” proposed solutions to make sure they do not undermine free expression, privacy, or vulnerable communities. She also discusses her upcoming departure from EFF, praises incoming executive director Nicole Ozer, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicole_Ozer] and says she hopes to return more directly to legal and civil-liberties battles as a “warrior lawyer.” Cindy Cohn: > When I look back on my career and I thought about, what are the things that I’ve done that have affected or helped the most people, I just don’t think anything comes close to freeing up encryption in terms of the impact. But also, as I mentioned, it’s not just about me. I’m very happy to tell the story. It was really fun to get to do that, but it’s a story about kind of a ragtag group of hackers and activists who bound together, and lo and behold, we won. I mean, that’s a narrative that is important for people to remember, even as I then did tell two other stories in the book where the win wasn’t so clean. I think all of those stories are important for people thinking about how can we make the world better today. You know, sometimes you get clean wins and sometimes you get messier situations, but the fights are always worth it. Support EFF [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1a/EFF_Logo.svg/330px-EFF_Logo.svg.png?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=index&utm_content=thumbnail&_=20100613063408]https://supporters.eff.org/donate/join-eff CLICK THIS LOGO TO SUPPORT THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION [https://supporters.eff.org/donate/join-eff] https://supporters.eff.org/donate/join-eff “When you go online, your rights go with you.” The post Cindy Cohn: Privacy’s Defender [https://plutopia.io/cindy-cohn-privacys-defender/] first appeared on Plutopia News Network [https://plutopia.io].