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Nvidia’s Jensen Huang has admitted an affair with a woman US intelligence reportedly believes was working for China’s Ministry of State Security. In this episode of Dead Drop, I go through how the story came out of a chip-smuggling investigation, who Alice Huang is, why Beijing would target the man at the centre of the AI chip race, and what comes next for Nvidia and Washington. Facts are as of 9 November 2026.

Ways to support the podcast:

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On the evening of 29 October 2026, around $6.3 billion in cryptocurrency was drained from Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange. Most of it went in about twenty minutes. It’s the largest theft of cryptocurrency on record, and the FBI has blamed a North Korean hacking unit it calls TraderTraitor. Pyongyang calls the accusation a political provocation.

This is the story of the Lazarus Group, the government hackers who have become one of the main things keeping Kim Jong Un’s regime afloat. Phil Thompson follows the trail from a single compromised laptop to the record-breaking heists at ByBit, Drift and Bitget. He looks at how stolen crypto is turned into real money through the “Chinese Laundromat”, and at the other ways North Korea earns cash: fake IT workers hired by Western companies, wig factories, and soldiers sent to fight for Russia in exchange for oil.

He also looks at where the money ends up, in a country whose legitimate exports barely reach $470 million a year but which is building hypersonic missiles and a nuclear-powered submarine.

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A farmer, three vans, a quantity of petrol, and a handler known only as “Ali”. In September, masked men were arrested a couple of miles from RAF Fairford, the Cotswolds base used by US bombers to strike Iran. The UK government says Iran’s Revolutionary Guard was almost certainly behind it, and two men have now been charged under the National Security Act.

In this episode, I look at what happened that night, what prosecutors have alleged in court, how Iran recruits local criminals in the UK, and why the American bombers have since gone home.