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
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