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
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
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
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
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
Virality used to mean chickenpox. Now it means your aunt’s Facebook post about Bill Gates putting 5G in your teabags. Progress, apparently. Somewhere between cat videos and Kremlin psy-ops, the word stopped being cute and started being terrifying. What we call “going viral” has become less about a quirky
In the pantheon of cybercrime, you expect the usual suspects: ransomware attacks that freeze hospitals, phishing scams that rob pensioners, and state-sponsored malware targeting power grids. But imagine a shadowy corner of the internet where the prize isn’t stolen credit cards or nuclear secrets, but the exact sous-vide timing
Welcome to the United Kingdom: land of historic traditions, collapsing infrastructure, and government systems running on programming languages that predate moon landings and colour television. The Queen is dead, the trains are delayed, and half the welfare system still relies on Colin, a 68-year-old COBOL wizard whose last holiday was
There’s something eerily hypnotic about a video of a fluffy kitten tumbling in a field of daisies, or a chubby pug struggling with a squeaky toy. Now imagine those videos aren’t made by actual animals, or even humans, but by AI spinning endless reels of digital fluff, designed
You thought turning off your webcam was enough to protect your privacy. Maybe you stuck a little sticker over it, felt smug, and whispered "Not today, Zuckerberg." But bad news, friend: it’s not the camera you should be afraid of anymore. It's your Wi-Fi. Enter
Society
The 1990s. A simpler time when modems screeched like tortured cats, websites looked like PowerPoint vomit, and the future was full of awkward optimism. We built things, dammit. We shared things. We gathered in IRC chatrooms, built open-source projects nobody paid us for, and wore trench coats not because we
Linux
Once upon a time in a quiet corner of your network, the address resolution protocol (ARP) decided to throw a house party. Everyone showed up: the guy with five IPs and one shady MAC, a bunch of TTL-decrementing ICMP packets playing musical chairs, and of course, no security bouncer at
Security
You locked your systems down. You’ve got firewalls like the Queen’s Guard on caffeine, passwords longer than War and Peace, and encryption so tight it makes the NSA weep. Congratulations, you’re now invincible. Except… you're not. Because while you're busy patching zero-days and
Surveillance
It’s 12:35pm. The dinner bell rings. Somewhere in a secondary school in Sheffield, a Year 8 boy shuffles up to the lunch counter. He’s got three things on his mind: chips, avoiding eye contact with the maths teacher, and chips again. But before he can exchange a
Security
The twenty-first-century superpower no longer needs to park an aircraft-carrier group next to its rival; it just needs a lab bench or a laptop, preferably one with the moral firewall turned off. In an era where the biggest battlefield is the weekly grocery run, two vectors, killer fungi and killer
Security
It started, as all great modern horror stories do, with a drop of clear liquid in a university lab. Harmless to the eye, innocuous to the touch, and, as it turns out, perfectly capable of hacking a computer. Yes, you read that correctly. A group of researchers at the University
Security
If you’ve ever queued on a windswept platform at Clapham Junction at half past seven on a February morning, you already understand pain. Now imagine you’re the poor soul in charge of the digital bits that keep Britain’s railways moving, the signalling servers, the smart-ticketing APIs, the
OSINT
So you want to run a sock puppet army online? Brilliant. Just don’t be the person who makes every fake account say “y’all,” obsess over Succession, and flood every post with the same tired three emojis. Because, surprise surprise, your “totally different” personalities start sounding like a broken
Espionage
Once upon a time, spycraft was elegant. Picture a trench coat, a hollow brick wall, maybe a microdot hidden behind a postage stamp. You’d whisper secrets in a Vienna park, then melt into the fog like a mysterious bout of indigestion. It was classy, it was clever, and more
Security
Ah, networking. That beautiful, terrifying realm where packets fly, ports open and close like drama-club relationships, and everything breaks just when you say, “It’s finally working.” Welcome, first-year undergrad. Let’s talk about one of the internet’s most passive-aggressive defense mechanisms: the TCP SYN cookie. You’ve probably
Surveillance
Remember when we thought academia was the conscience of society? The wise old owl watching over ethics while Silicon Valley played with its shiny new toys? Well, it turns out that owl was actually busy writing code to help cameras track your face across a crowded street. This week’s
How nation-states offload surveillance like global CDNs - redundant, invisible, and without your consent. You’ve got nothing to hide, right? You use Signal. Your Wi-Fi boasts a 20-character password. You even skimmed a privacy policy once. But somewhere along the way, you clicked “accept cookies” on a website that