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.
Why transparency must become a safety standard in the synthetic age. AI-generated content is saturating our feeds, our politics, and our sense of reality. Yet unlike every other product that touches public life, from food to finance, synthetic media carries no label of origin. If society is to preserve trust
Networks
There are two kinds of network traffic: the stuff you expect, polite HTTP calls, earnest software updates, and the occasional desperate Zoom feed, and the stuff that looks exactly like the first lot but is actually committing crimes in a bowler hat. ICMP sits firmly in the first category: a
Linux
There’s a certain breed of “cybersecurity enthusiast” who believes enlightenment lies somewhere between installing Arch Linux and setting their terminal background to a gradient of anime characters. They’ll spend six hours customising their Zsh prompt to display Unicode cows and still can’t tell you the difference between
Surveillance
There was a time when the Internet was supposed to save us. It was going to democratise information, topple dictators, and make cat memes a universal language of peace. A borderless agora of human connection, creativity, and collaboration. Remember that? Now, it mostly spies on us, lectures us, and occasionally
Surveillance
Closed-Circuit Television. Even the name sounds like it was designed to lull you into compliance. “Closed-circuit,” as if to reassure you it’s just a cosy little private show, like some electrical knitting club that couldn’t possibly concern you. Yet Britain runs the world’s longest-running soap opera on
When the internet whispers “just patch the server,” it forgets the sensible little human who will prop the back door open with a smile. In the old caper film tradition, breaking into a place rarely required a sledgehammer; it required a line, a prop, perfect timing, and someone who believed