London, UK -  I work in cyber security but write about the broader technology landscape, looking past the hype to discover what works, what doesn't, and whether any of it truly improves our lives.

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EtherHiding: When good blockchains turn bad
 -  With AI stealing the limelight over the last few years, it’s been a while since it was fashionable to talk about the blockchain. But it’s still out there, most famously used to track cryptocurrency transactions and hold smart contracts. Part of wh...
The untapped potential of AI for security operations
 -  In August 2025, Anthropic announced it had caught a threat actor using Claude in a series of cyber attacks. The large language model (LLM) helped the attacker in their reconnaissance and network compromise, but also in more strategic tasks: choosi...
Field Notes 4 // New York, note taking, and Blindr
 -  Welcome back to Field Notes. The eagle-eyed might have noticed that it is October, and not August. The end of July into September was a testing period for me. I was often exhausted to the point that I could do nothing on evenings and weekends exce...
Claude's café pop-up convinced me to switch LLMs
 -  There’s a new cool kid on the AI block, and its name is Anthropic. On my recent trip to New York, I noted the huge poster campaigns for its Claude large language models (LLMs), but it turned out that was just the beginning. Just after I flew back ...
New York City: Observations and recommendations
 -  I first visited New York in 2024, and those few rain-drenched days left a deep impression on me. I did my lap of the usual tourist sights, but my affection for the place lay elsewhere. Something excited me about the city at street level - an inspi...
Take note: How to waste less time on the internet
 -  We all waste far too much time online. There’s overt time wasting, like the mindless auto-queued videos on TikTok, and less obvious time wasting, like time spent browsing Hacker News and reading semi-technical blog posts. “But Matt,” you might say...
A reminder that you can just do things... kind of
 -  “You can just do things” has become common advice online. It’s a modern iteration on the ethos that fortune favours the brave - a proclamation that you’re only one bold move away from the life you’ve always dreamt of. Yeah right, was my initial re...
Death Stranding: The journeys lost to life on demand
 -  Just before the launch of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, the latest game from legendary director Hideo Kojima and his team at Kojima Productions, something unusual happened. Tickets started going on sale for small events in Los Angeles, Sydney, ...
Amazon Kindle review: I wish I'd bought one years ago
 -  An e-reader post in 2025? It feels like most readers who would be interested in devices like the Amazon Kindle were sold on the idea a long time ago. But some - like myself - held on to physical books, preferring the printed word and taking a defi...
AI chatbots are kicking journalism while it's down
 -  Where do you go when you need to find information online? For decades, my answer to that question would have been Google, but in the past few years I’ve increasingly turned to ChatGPT and other AI services, which - generally speaking - uncover nic...

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Digital journalism
Coincidentally, in the space of a week I encountered both Zach Seward's article about Quartz and Craig Mod's excellent podcasts with Tim Ferriss. Both evoked fond memories of my time in journalism and the buzz surrounding digital journalism and media in the 2010s

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