Zero Downtime

Zero Downtime brings together tech, business, and the everyday experiences of running an IT company. John and Logan discuss what’s going on in their world, the questions people ask them most, and talk with other business owners and professionals in conversations that are real, relaxed, and worth your time.

Zero Downtime is a technology podcast hosted by John Hass, with 42 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

John Hass hosts Zero Downtime, a technology show with 42 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #43

  LG TVs Watch You Back, Europe Exits Microsoft, Microsoft 365 Outage, 3 Chatbots Down

  Sep 14, 20261h 22m

  LG Ad Solutions actually tells advertisers they can "own the living room." European governments and militaries are actively migrating off Microsoft. Microsoft 365 suffered a multi-day outage that took down Exchange and authentication. And ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok all had overlapping outages on the same day. This week, John and Logan break down nine stories covering surveillance, cloud reliability, cybersecurity, and what happens when the tool you built your workflow around suddenly stops responding. Stories in this episode: Your TV is watching back. Gamers Nexus published an investigation into LG smart TVs, and the allegations go well beyond home screen ads. Automatic content recognition identifies what you're watching even when the TV is being used as an HDMI display. LG's own advertising describes reaching associated phones, tablets, and computers in the household. Independent research also demonstrated that a compromised TV can record room audio while its screen appears off. If a display only needs to show HDMI, keep it off your network entirely. Europe is building the Microsoft exit. Austria's military moved 16,000 PCs from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. Schleswig-Holstein reports nearly 80 percent of its administrative workstations on LibreOffice, with more than 15 million euros in license savings. France's DINUM is moving to Linux. The ICC switched to openDesk after American sanctions. These are tested alternatives with working software behind them. Microsoft 365 down. On August 31, an authentication configuration incident took out Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Exchange, and Microsoft's security and compliance products. Recovery took several days. Then Friday brought a separate Exchange Online incident delaying external email. Email is one of the most basic services businesses buy from Microsoft. Three chatbots down. On September 3, ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok experienced overlapping disruptions. The lesson is not that AI failed. It is that your project instructions, source documents, and current drafts sitting inside one AI service can become inaccessible when that service goes down. Keep your work somewhere you control. Plus Australia proposing an algorithm off switch that would let you choose a following-only feed, Berlin's government hack turning into a fight over whether to let CrowdStrike investigate, Trezor's shipping partner exposing 67,000 more customers after previously confirming the data was deleted, ShinyHunters posting data attributed to McKesson and Jack Henry after voice phishing entry, and a Windows 11 preview update that broke mouse cursor and desktop settings on non-English installations. New episodes weekly. Follow Zero Downtime for cybersecurity, AI, privacy, and the tech stories that actually matter.

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  Episode #42

  Malware Steals Claude Sessions, Google Nerfs Pixel 11, EU vs ChatGPT, Chinese Cisco Spy Op

  Sep 7, 20261h 6m

  Infostealer malware is quietly harvesting active Claude login sessions and burning through victims' AI quotas, and 2FA won't stop it. Google removed a key hardware security feature from the Pixel 11, and GrapheneOS is now telling people to buy a Motorola instead. The EU has officially decided ChatGPT is a "search engine." And a China-linked hacking group turned compromised Cisco routers into full-blown spy platforms that lie to the administrator looking at them. This week, John and Logan break down six stories covering AI security, phones, regulation, and one very uncomfortable question about your router. Stories in this episode: Malware steals Claude sessions. Anthropic is warning users that infostealer families like Vidar, LummaC2, StealC, RedLine, and Atomic Stealer are harvesting active Claude sessions from infected computers. The attackers don't need your password or 2FA code. They're stealing the session token that says you already authenticated. Some users noticed their Claude usage limit reset and then disappear again while they weren't using it. That's because somebody else was. Google nerfs the Pixel 11. GrapheneOS spent about a week working on its Pixel 11 port before concluding that Google removed hardware Memory Tagging Extension. MTE existed on Pixel 8, 9, and 10, and GrapheneOS builds core exploit protection around it. GrapheneOS is now recommending users not buy the Pixel 11 and pointing instead to a new partnership with Motorola, whose 2027 flagship phones are expected to become the first officially supported non-Pixel devices. EU calls ChatGPT a search engine. Under the Digital Services Act, ChatGPT crossed 45 million monthly EU users and got officially designated a Very Large Online Search Engine. The classification isn't just a label. It brings mandatory systemic risk assessments covering illegal content and child safety (reasonable) but also misinformation, electoral processes, and public discourse (much fuzzier). Non-compliance can trigger fines of up to 6% of worldwide annual turnover. Chinese hackers turn Cisco routers into spy platforms. A China-linked group called Fire Ant compromised Cisco IOS XR routers, TACACS authentication servers, and Linux management systems. Custom router malware suppressed syslog messages, modified show command output, and turned routers into packet capture devices uploading traffic to external FTP servers. If you SSH into your router and everything looks fine, that may be the malware answering your questions. Plus Proton's political neutrality problem (SSH keys in a synced password manager and a $100K donation into one of the most politically charged conflicts on Earth), and California accidentally giving Linux a pass on age verification through the AB 1856 open-source exemption. New episodes weekly. Follow Zero Downtime for cybersecurity, AI, privacy, and the tech stories that actually matter.

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  Episode #41

  T-Mobile Stopped China With Scissors, GTA 6 Leaked, Walmart Takes Apple Pay, Zombie Credit Cards

  Aug 31, 202656 min

  T-Mobile stopped a Chinese state-sponsored hacking campaign by physically cutting a network cable with a pair of scissors. The GTA 6 leaker appears to actually have a playable build of the unreleased game. Walmart is finally accepting Apple Pay after a 12-year cold war. And university researchers just figured out how to bring expired Visa credit cards back from the dead. This week, John and Logan break down seven stories covering nation-state cyberattacks, game leaks, payment security, and a piece of Apple history that involves the CIA. Stories in this episode: T-Mobile stopped China with scissors. In late 2024, the Salt Typhoon campaign was tearing through American telecommunications companies. T-Mobile spotted routing traffic coming from a device that was powered off and traced it back to compromised equipment at another telecom in Chicago. CSO Jeff Simon and three other employees drove to a data center, located the connection, and cut it with a pair of scissors. T-Mobile kept the severed cable and it's now on display at headquarters. GTA 6 leaker apparently has the game. A person calling themselves CyberLeek has been dropping unreleased GTA 6 footage. The clip that changed everything shows the protagonist landing a plane, walking to a wall, and using individual bullet holes to spell the word "LEEK." You cannot coincidentally shoot LEEK into a wall during someone else's demo. Take-Two has subpoenaed Microsoft and Discord. Rockstar now has to stop somebody who can play the unreleased game from telling the internet how it ends. Zombie credit cards. Researchers at UMass Amherst discovered that the expiration date on a Visa card is not cryptographically protected in Visa's Kernel 3 implementation. Two Android phones and Wi-Fi are enough to relay a real card's authentication while quietly changing the expiration date in transit. They demonstrated a $100 contactless transaction on an expired Visa. Destroy your old cards. Walmart finally accepts Apple Pay. Starting August 24th, Walmart and Sam's Club begin rolling out Tap to Pay in select stores. Walmart spent 12 years fighting NFC payments, backed the disastrous CurrentC consortium in 2011, and stuck with QR codes long after the rest of the country moved on. CurrentC is dead. Apple Pay survived. Plus the LockBit ransomware group listing U.S. Bank as a victim (which U.S. Bank strongly disputes and attributes to a fourth-party event), the newly reported story of how the CIA may have accidentally saved Steve Jobs' NeXT with a 20,000-computer order and set the stage for the iPhone, and a new subdomain enumeration tool called crt.name that indexes more than five billion hostnames through a free API. New episodes weekly. Follow Zero Downtime for cybersecurity, AI, privacy, and the tech stories that actually matter.

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  Episode #40

  Amazon Shreds Books for AI, Gates Daughter Cookie Stuffs, Apple Spyware Alerts, McDonald's Hacked

  Aug 24, 20261h 13m

  Amazon is buying rare books, cutting the bindings off, and shredding them into an AI training pipeline. Bill Gates' daughter's shopping startup is accused of dropping affiliate cookies without earning them. Apple just warned iPhone users in 110 countries that they've been individually targeted by mercenary spyware. And McDonald's, Costco, Dell, and Charles Schwab all showed up in the same corporate data dump this week. This week, John and Logan break down nine stories covering AI, cybersecurity, and the strange corners of modern tech. Stories in this episode: Amazon is destroying books to train AI. 404 Media journalists hid an AirTag inside a book that was part of a bulk order and tracked the shipment to Amazon's LAS8 facility in Las Vegas. Workers reportedly cut the bindings off, separate the pages, and scan them at high speed, destroying the physical book. The internet is now so contaminated with AI-generated text that physical books have become premium training data. Bill Gates' daughter accused of cookie stuffing. Bloomberg obtained internal Slack messages allegedly showing Phoebe Gates personally asking developers to make sure her shopping startup Phia's browser extension dropped affiliate cookies even when customers didn't click the coupon. In June, those disputed cookie drops reportedly represented about 51 percent of the merchandise value Phia claimed credit for selling. Apple warns 110 countries of mercenary spyware. Apple notified iPhone users across 110 countries that they had been individually targeted by Pegasus-class spyware. Apple is now surfacing these warnings on the Lock Screen and in Settings. And Apple says it has never observed a successful mercenary-spyware compromise of a device with Lockdown Mode enabled. McDonald's and Costco hit through Azure. A threat actor calling himself TheHatman is dumping employee databases from McDonald's, Vodafone, Kyndryl, UPS, Dell, Costco, Gap, Lululemon, and Charles Schwab. This is not a breach of Azure itself. The attacker appears to be using legitimate corporate credentials previously stolen by infostealer malware to log in and query the corporate directory. Plus Stripe paying $7 billion for OpenRouter after an 82-day valuation jump from $1.3 billion, RingCentral getting voice-phished into a 1.6 million account breach, Epic Games finally building a native Linux launcher, Apple losing its Digital Markets Act gatekeeper fight in the EU, and a Trezor shipping partner breach that exposed the home addresses of nearly 14,000 crypto wallet customers. New episodes weekly. Follow Zero Downtime for cybersecurity, AI, privacy, and the tech stories that actually matter.

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  Episode #39

  Data Centers Aren't the Enemy, AI Hacked a Gym for Pilates, City 911 Attack, Signal Ditches Phones

  Aug 17, 20261h 9m

  An autonomous AI agent cancelled someone else's Pilates reservation to move its owner up the waitlist. A California city's 911 system went down in a cyberattack. Signal is quietly working on letting you sign up without a phone number. And Zero Downtime pushes back on the current media panic about data centers. This week, John and Logan cover five stories about where technology is actually going, and where the narrative is getting it wrong. Stories in this episode: Data centers are not the enemy. The current narrative is that data centers are draining the grid, drying up aquifers, and creating no jobs. The reality is more complicated. Yes, they use a lot of electricity, but the question is whether America builds more generation to meet demand or treats increasing electricity use as a societal failure. Every data center is a factory for computation, which is what banks, hospitals, 911 systems, and the entire modern internet run on. The right conversation is not "should we stop building them," it is "how do we build them responsibly." AI hacked a gym for a Pilates spot. A Melbourne executive gave a Claude-powered autonomous agent one job: book his gym classes. The agent discovered the gym's GraphQL API, bypassed the website's booking restriction, and when the user asked if his waitlist position could be improved, the agent found it could cancel other people's reservations because of a broken authorization check. So it did. Someone in Australia lost their Pilates spot because another guy's AI decided that was the fastest path to the objective. California city 911 cyberattack. On August 7th at 5:45 AM, malicious software hit Suisun City's IT network, affecting 911 routing, police and fire dispatch, and records systems. The city shut down the entire network to contain it. Emergency calls were rerouted through Solano County and public safety response continued. That is disaster recovery working the way it is supposed to. Signal without a phone number. Unreleased code in Signal's Android app suggests the company is working on a way to register without a phone number, using either a one-time in-app payment or an existing account key. Phone numbers were always Signal's anti-spam mechanism. If Signal can replace that with a small monetary cost, mass account creation becomes prohibitively expensive while normal users get a truly identity-free option. Plus IPv8, a new 2026 Internet-Draft that asks whether IPv6 was the wrong answer to the address exhaustion problem, and proposes a 64-bit address format that treats IPv4 as a subset instead of a replacement. New episodes weekly. Follow Zero Downtime for cybersecurity, AI, privacy, infrastructure, and the tech stories that actually matter.

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