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
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
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
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
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
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
