Security
Somewhere right now, a perfectly innocent-looking smart kettle in Milton Keynes is quietly participating in a global cybercrime infrastructure with better uptime than your employer’s VPN. It does not complain. It does not open a ticket. It does not send passive-aggressive emails about “workload priorities.” It simply does its
Computer Science
It starts innocently. You just want to search for something. A word, a phone number, perhaps the occasional email address belonging to your former classmate who still owes you £60 for books. You could do this the normal way, with a search box like a civilised human, or you could
Society
There is a particular species of modern myth-making that thrives in Silicon Valley, a kind of techno-spiritual folklore woven from hoodies, venture capital, and the irresistible editorial urge to attribute vast, complex achievements to a solitary man who, ideally, looks photogenic on the cover of Wired. This is the “Lone
Geopolitics
If you ever wanted proof that geopolitics is fundamentally absurd, look no further than Unicode, the global standard that decides which scribbles count as legitimate text in the digital world. You might assume this is the most boring standards committee on earth, some cardigan-wearing librarians quietly debating whether “🫠” (the melting
Cryptography
There’s a peculiar comfort in knowing that governments have always been bewildered by technology. Today they struggle with TikTok; in the 1990s they struggled with mathematics. Not complicated mathematics, either, just the sort involving large prime numbers and a few lines of code. But give a politician even a
Surveillance
Modern Britain loves a good motoring myth. For decades we believed our cars were faithful companions: sturdy mechanical horses helping us gallop through life, guided only by petrol, luck, and a questionable relationship with the Highway Code. But that age has vanished faster than a government minister faced with accountability.
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