An episode from The Homework Machine:

Three years after ChatGPT landed in classrooms, schools are still sorting out what comes next. What counts as cheating when AI can do your homework? How should teachers use it, or not? And how do students feel about learning alongside a machine? The Homework Machine explores the promises and pitfalls of AI in education through the people living it – teachers, students, and the communities caught in-between. 

For years, North Korea has quietly dispatched an army of IT workers overseas—not to innovate, but to infiltrate. Disguised as freelancers, they apply for jobs, breach systems, and wire stolen funds back to Pyongyang. We return to a rare conversation with one of them—a defector—about the regime’s digital underworld, and the personal toll of escaping it.

We return to a story on the Akira ransomware group. For 150 years Knights of Old, a U.K. logistics company, survived everything from two world wars to Brexit. Then Akira stormed the company's networks. In just a blink of an eye, everything changed.

Washington is trimming budgets… and bleeding digital expertise. So what happens when national security is run by agencies living in the past? Sue Gordon, former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, helps us break it down.

We tend to picture cyberattacks as distant battles—state hackers, big targets, glowing maps of global chaos. But often, the frontlines are more local: a water plant, a 911 system, the power lines outside your window. In this CyberMonday crossover with WAMU’s 1A, we examine a small-town breach, the fragility of our digital infrastructure—and what it means for all of us.

Milo Comerford has been studying online extremism for more than a decade. He’s watched ideologies rise and fall, platforms shift, and tactics mutate. Now, as kids fall into violent online communities with no ideology at all, Milo says we’re overdue for a new playbook. Today: the solutions he thinks might actually work.

Across the internet, groups like 764 are redefining extremism: less about beliefs, more about chaos. We look at how the movement works, who it attracts, and why stopping it is so challenging.

Car theft has gone digital. We talk to a white-hat hacker about how cars became computers on wheels—and why, in the race for smarter tech, safety is still trying to catch up.

Volvo built its reputation on safety. Then a software update nearly sent one driver off a cliff. We look at what happens when car companies start acting like tech companies — and discover the danger of “move fast and break things” on the open road.

The Espionage Act was written more than a century ago to stop spies and saboteurs. But over time, its reach has quietly expanded — from enemy agents to insiders, and now, possibly, to the press itself. Georgetown Law’s Stephen Vladeck explains how a law built for wartime secrecy could become one of the most powerful tools in Washington’s arsenal.