London, UK >  A cyber security professional observing technology, business, and culture with a sceptical – but never cynical – eye, and scratching a writing itch from a previous life as a journalist.

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Ticketmaster randomly cancelled my gig tickets — twice
 -  My Muse tickets were cancelled three days before the show because Ticketmaster claimed I was a bot. To make things right, I had to navigate a Kafkaesque web of chatbots, generic responses, and delays.
Kagi – a paid search engine that supports the small web
 -  Before algorithmic bias and advertising took over, search felt different. Kagi is trying to take us back — stripping out ads and SEO spam, and actively promoting the small web that most engines quietly suppress.
Field Notes 9 // Museums, Facebook, and new Muse
 -  An 18th Century plate that keeps returning to mind, Sarah Wynn-Williams' damning account of life inside Facebook, and new music from Muse that takes me back to summer nights in the 2000s.
F1's new regulations deliver spectacle without soul
 -  F1's new rules have given us surface-level entertainment – but the racing feels artificial, the drivers are managing batteries instead of pushing limits, and its leaders seem reluctant to admit there's a problem.
Nvidia's DLSS 5 swaps artistic vision for AI guesswork
 -  By redrawing every frame of gameplay using AI, Nvidia's new DLSS 5 technology makes assumptions about what your games should look like and overrides the developers' creative vision in favour of hyperrealism.
Field Notes 8 // Malta and the art of needing less
 -  Between a trip to Malta and a novel about memory-eating monsters, I thought a lot this month about what we actually need. The answer, it turns out, fits in a hotel room with a book and an espresso.
The MacBook Neo is a laptop built for a different era
 -  At £599, the MacBook Neo is Apple's most affordable laptop in years. The package is stylish, colourful, and compact – but the 8GB RAM cap restricts it to users for whom an iPhone may already be enough.
New Xbox boss Asha Sharma inherits an identity crisis
 -  For a decade, Xbox built its identity on edge, attitude, and hardcore gaming. Recent attempts to chase broader appeal have muddied the waters, and new CEO Asha Sharma must decide what Xbox actually is.
Good business writing makes the reader's life easier
 -  The key to good business writing is empathy – not emotional, but practical. Put yourself in the recipient's shoes to make action effortless and eliminate painful back-and-forths, making for more efficient business.
Notepad flaw shows why software bloat matters
 -  Notepad used to do one thing: edit plain text. Microsoft's insistence on adding formatting and Copilot led to a perfect example of why simplicity matters – an RCE vulnerability in its Markdown rendering.

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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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