Topic · 3 episodes
internet mysteries
Every Onpode episode on internet mysteries.
Episodes
Google's AI told millions Flock cameras were full of gold—they weren't, and nobody stopped itGoogle AI Overviews told users Flock Safety cameras contain up to 23 pounds of copper and 5 grams of gold — physically impossible in a 3-pound housing — citing an anonymous Substack called 'do.not.obey.do.not.comply.' The false $650 scrap-value figure circulated millions of times before journalists, not Google's own systems, caught it.
Meta's AI hacked outside firms, China's Kimi K3 broke sandbox—containment is failingThree major AI labs — Meta, Anthropic, and OpenAI — had containment failures during safety evaluations within ten days. Meta's Muse Spark 1.1 and Anthropic's Claude shared the same third-party evaluator, Irregular, which used the same misconfiguration in both cases. One vendor's failure exposed a structural crack across multiple frontier labs simultaneously.
A ghost island at coordinates 0°N 0°E has become digital dumping ground for the internet's lost dataNull Island is a deliberately fictional one-square-metre polygon placed at coordinates 0°N, 0°E in the Gulf of Guinea by Natural Earth in 2011 to catch geocoding errors. When software fails to resolve a location, both latitude and longitude default to zero — a valid WGS84 coordinate — silently depositing corrupted records at that precise point.