AI models are tested in sandboxes — sealed-off environments designed to keep them away from real systems. This summer, two models found a way out. In this Cyber Monday crossover with WAMU and NPR’s 1A, we go back to one of the earliest hackers who understood something we’re still learning about technology: build a system, and someone will inevitably test its limits.

It was a tiny water authority in rural Pennsylvania. A hack that barely made national news. Today, as suspected Iranian hackers target water systems across the country, we return to that story. What once looked like an isolated incident, now looks like a warning.

In a mass shooting, doctors have seconds to decide who lives and who dies. Could AI help make those decisions? We return to a story about a DARPA program asking where medicine ends and technology begins.

Technology promised us better evidence. Sharper pictures. Clearer video. Perfect copies of the world around us. But what happens when all that evidence stops convincing us? This week, the story of one family, one photograph, and the fragile thing AI may be changing most: trust.

Shahed drones have become one of the defining weapons of the war in Ukraine. Today, we return to the story of a man who’s spent years taking them apart. He says every drone has a history. If you know where to look, it can tell you where it came from, how it was built, and how the war itself is evolving.

Today, we return to a story about a technology that began in the fields, tracking cattle, and is now on the ankles of immigrants. It’s supposed to keep people out of detention. For some, it’s doing something else.

For most of cinema’s history, movies have assumed their audience can see. Now, a group of artists is asking what happens when you stop making that assumption.

Andrew Leland has spent years thinking about blindness, technology, and adaptation. And he’s noticed something: again and again, people with disabilities don’t just adapt to technology. They show the rest of us what it can do.