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.
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