2025-04-21 -  I recently stumbled upon a Hacker News thread around a series of X posts about ChatGPT’s o3 model. Researchers noted that it “frequently fabricates actions it never took, and then elaborately justifies those actions when confronted”, in one case claiming to have received an incorrect result by running code on...

2025-04-16 -  As I mentioned in a recent post, I moved to a new home a few months ago. My new place sits atop a hill, and the window to the right of my desk happens to look away from the city, over the tops of the houses opposite and off into...

2025-04-08 -  I moved to a new home late last year, and immediately faced a whole range of connectivity issues. For a techie like myself, reliant on a functional network both for work and for fun, that was a big problem. So I implemented a few different solutions to find a fix...

2024-07-20 -  When I went to bed on the evening of Friday 19th July, I couldn’t sleep. It was a stuffy summer’s night in London, and the adrenaline was still pumping through my veins after one of the more notable days in recent memory for cyber security. Still, laying awake gave me...

2023-11-26 -  The dictionary definition of “modular” leaves a little to be desired: “Employing or involving a module or modules as the basis of design or construction.” What is implied, but that I would make explicit, is that parts of the whole can be swapped out easily while maintaining the functionality of...

2023-03-26 -  Stick around cyber security Twitter or LinkedIn for long enough and you’ll likely see somebody raise a question about how to get into the industry. You’ll also likely see a reply that describes a kind of rite of passage from sysadmin, to SOC analyst, to just about any other security...

2023-02-17 -  I got my first new laptop in six years this week! The new hardware is definitely exciting, but reviews aren’t really my thing, so while I’ll inevitably tweet about how the Microsoft Surface Laptop fares, that’s not the purpose of this post. This is more about the mundane job of...

2023-01-13 -  A belated happy new year! If you’re reading this, I hope you have a terrific 2023. I recently went back and read some old posts that have long since been deleted from this blog - writings from my journalism days that reminded me of my perspectives on certain news events...

2022-12-14 -  If I was to describe how often malware is downloaded within ZIP archives, “common” would be a huge understatement. A key artefact in these investigations is the temporary directory Windows creates when a user opens an archive in Explorer, but I recently realised I’d never actually run a proper test...

2022-12-03 -  Faced with a day at home recovering from my most recent COVID-19 booster vaccine, I realised I hadn’t written anything more than a few lines of PowerShell in a while and decided to spend some time working on something interesting. The idea occurred to me to try to correlate Windows...