Networks
At 02:14 on an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday, an accountant at Thames & District Water Services (fictitious), a critical infrastructure provider whose security budget was approved by someone who still calls Wi-Fi “the wireless internet”, appeared to log in and begin transferring large volumes of financial records to an external
Security
There’s something wonderfully comforting about space. The vastness. The stars. The crushing existential reminder that one day all this will end, and none of your unread Slack threads will matter. And of course, the satellites, those sophisticated metal darlings we’ve lobbed into orbit to beam encrypted packets of
Data Science
If you’ve spent more than five minutes on social media, you’ve probably noticed that the platforms occasionally feel like they’re being run by a particularly vindictive committee of parrots, each endlessly repeating whatever phrase they last overheard. And sometimes, that’s not too far from the truth.
Anthropology
We used to tell stories about monsters that lived in the woods. Now we tell stories about them living in the cloud. The vocabulary has changed, no more demons or witches, just “malware” and “threat actors”, but the moral is the same: there are invisible forces out there, and they
Surveillance
The Panopticon Went Open-Plan There was a time when surveillance was something done to us. We imagined it as a one-way mirror: the grey bureaucrat in the watchtower, the citizen below. But the mirror has shattered, and its shards are everywhere, glowing softly in our pockets, perched on lampposts, hovering
Society
When Robert Hannigan, former Director of GCHQ and architect of the UK’s cyber-defence upgrade, published his book Counter-Intelligence: What the Secret World Can Teach Us About Problem Solving and Creativity, one relatively quiet line stood out. He wrote warmly of the people within the agency who were “on the
Networks
There comes a moment in every student’s or analyst’s life when they double-click a .pcap file and realise, with quiet horror, that they’ve just opened the digital equivalent of War and Peace, written in hexadecimal and performed entirely by arguing machines. You scroll for a bit, see
Surveillance
By now, you already know you’re being watched. The world has quietly turned into one big data buffet, and we’re all on the menu, diced, tagged, and served to anyone with a corporate expense account. Every click, stroll, and muttered insult at a bus stop is fodder for
Society
A while back, being a “tech rebel” meant something. You might have been soldering cables in your parents’ basement, tunnelling into a university mainframe, or convincing Congress that the internet was one lightning storm away from collapse. You wore black not because it looked cool in a keynote, but because
Geopolitics
There’s a moment in every civilization, usually right before the wheels come off, when the richest people in the room start talking about demons. For Russia, that moment was Rasputin, the unwashed mystic whispering into the ear of a doomed royal family. For post-Soviet Russia, it was Alexander Dugin,
Networks
If you wanted to smuggle a message across the internet without raising eyebrows, you could do worse than a multiplayer game. It’s noisy, it’s encrypted, it’s socially acceptable at 3 a.m., and your firewall team will fight harder to keep Fortnite working than your VPN. Perfect
Counter-Intelligence
The Scene: Rum, Radios, and Ridiculous Codes Picture it: late 1920s. A cold Atlantic dawn, waves slapping against the side of a Coast Guard cutter somewhere off New Jersey. In a small shack onshore, a woman sits hunched over a radio receiver, a pencil poised over a scrap of paper.