Welcome back to the digital wasteland, fellow survivors. We kick things off in the FOLLOW UP by marking a year since the LA Fires—hello, PTSD—alongside a 4th Strokiversary and three years of sobriety, all while wondering why America is currently obsessed with shooting its own civilians in the face.

In the IN THE NEWS segment, Wired is finally teaching us how to protest safely in the age of surveillance, and the EFF is cheering on the hackers fighting ICE’s Nazi-adjacent tracking tactics. Meanwhile, Meta is harvesting your AI chats for targeted ads, Disney is paying $10 million for spying on kids, and Grok has spent the holidays generating nonconsensual child abuse material—a problem Elon Musk won't have to legally reckon with until the Take It Down Act hits in May. Instagram’s Adam Mosseri has basically surrendered to the AI "slop", suggesting we fingerprint "real" media because the fake stuff has already won the war.

As we continue the descent, OpenAI is launching a ChatGPT Health portal despite their "loser energy" and compute limits, while Character.AI and Google are quietly settling lawsuits for bots that encouraged teen suicide. Polymarket gamblers are learning that "decentralized" juries will fist you over the definition of an "invasion" just as fast as a bank. Uber showed off a new Lucid-based robotaxi, but we’re pumping the brakes on the safety hype given that autonomous vehicles are five times more likely to crash at dusk. To wrap up the news, Tim Cook took home $74 million last year, which is a lot of "systematic philanthropy" he could be doing right now instead of just writing checks to his own ego.

In MEDIA CANDY, we’re suffering through the Stranger Things wrap-up and a John McTiernan holiday marathon, though the real highlight is MTV Rewind’s tribute to music videos. We’ve got Traitors, The Pitt, and even a John Candy doc on the list, while APPS & DOODADS brings us the DJI Osmo 8, Victrola’s turntable-vibrating speakers. At least California’s DROP tool lets you purge your data from 500 brokers at once.

Finally, we go to THE DARK SIDE WITH DAVE to hear Dave Bittner rant about holiday tech support, health insurance gouging, and Dave Filoni taking the Star Wars reins. We close out with a look at ILM’s 50th, the deepfake porn cesspool formerly known as Twitter, and a birthday toast to the Starman himself, David Bowie.

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Show notes at https://gog.show/728

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/x-2GTUC6rcU

IN THE NEWS

How to Protest Safely in the Age of Surveillance

How Hackers Are Fighting Back Against ICE

Meta’s New Privacy Policy Opens Up AI Chats for Targeted Ads

Disney to Pay $10 Million After Feds Say It Broke Kids’ Privacy Rules on YouTube

People Spent the Holidays Asking Grok to Generate Sexual Images of Children

Here's When Elon Musk Will Finally Have to Reckon With His Nonconsensual Porn Generator

Instagram chief: AI is so ubiquitous 'it will be more practical to fingerprint real media than fake media'

ChatGPT is launching a new dedicated Health portal

Character.AI and Google settle with families in teen suicide and self-harm lawsuits

Gambling platform Polymarket not paying bets on US invasion of Venezuela

Uber reveals the design of its robotaxi at CES 2026

Maybe We Should Pump the Brakes on the Idea That Robotaxis Are Safer

Here’s how much Tim Cook and other Apple execs made last year

MEDIA CANDY

The Pitt

Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale

Jurassic World Rebirth

The Darjeeling Limited

Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

Honey Don’t

John Candy: I Like Me

MTV Rewind is a developer's tribute to 24/7 music video channels

APPS & DOODADS

DJI Osmo Mobile 8

Netflix Games

This speaker by Victrola sits underneath turntables and streams audio via Bluetooth

Delete Request and Opt-out Platform (DROP)

THE DARK SIDE WITH DAVE

Dave Bittner

The CyberWire

Hacking Humans

Caveat

Control Loop

Only Malware in the Building

Industrial Light & Magic: 50 Years of Innovation

Dave Filoni to run Star Wars

Who’s who at X, the deepfake porn site formerly known as Twitter

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