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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Humanising AI encourages intellectual lethargy
 -  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 c...
Finding comfort in the green hills outside my window
 -  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 the green hills be...
Fixing weak WiFi and slow speeds on my home network
 -  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 solutio...
Endpoint detection and response (EDR) - setting the record straight
 -  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,...
Centralisation, repeatability, and automation in a modular SOC
 -  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 o...
Cyber security sometimes means learning things backwards
 -  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 analy...
Using winget to automate software deployment to a new laptop
 -  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 i...
2023: Thoughts on new challenges and sharing experiences
 -  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...
Investigating Explorer's temporary ZIP folders and retrieving files
 -  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 re...
Parsing login sessions from the Windows event log with PowerShell
 -  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 occurre...

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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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