Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Wired's director of business and industry, Zoe Shipper.

Today on the show, we're bringing you five stories that you need to know about this week,

including how federal workers are navigating layoffs and political interests in the continuing government shutdown.

I'm joined today by senior politics writer Jake LaHutt. Jake, welcome back to Uncanny

Valley. Great two X, Zoe. And could I interest you in a cyber truck? Oh my gosh, could you ever?

We're going to talk about that today. Our first story, however, is kind of scarier than a cyber truck,

might I say. It's about how satellites are leaking all

kinds of information from regular calls and texts to military and corporate secrets. Our colleague

Andy Greenberg and Matt Burgess reported this week that a group of researchers from UC San Diego

and the University of Maryland found that roughly half of satellite signals are unprotected from

anyone coming in and just eavesdropping. Well, this is great. It's very good to know.

Yeah. A classic Andy Greenberg story right here. Also, if you want your full Andy Greenberg fix

for this weekend, folks, you got to check out this YouTube video he made about hacking a poker

like card shuffling machine.

But, like, what kind of data are these satellites leaking exactly?

So the researchers developed a pretty modest, off-the-shelf satellite dish that cost them like $800 to build.

And they set it up on the roof of a building at UC San Diego.

So for three years, they picked up the

communications from satellites that would pass through the area by simply pointing at them

and interpreting the signals that were being received. And they assembled this pretty

alarming collection of private data. So people's texts and calls from T-Mobile's cellular network,

data from passengers in-flight

...