Is that a walrus in your server logs, or aren't you pleased to see me? Opinion At the start of September, Transport for London was hit by a major cyber attack. TfL is the public body that moves many of London's human bodies to and from work and play …

Struggle ye not with cookies, lest ye become a cookie monster Opinion The people are defeated. Worn out, deflated, and apathetic about the barrage of banners and pop-ups about cookies and permissions.... [...]

• Quite Unlikely A New Technology’s Useful, Man Opinion We have a new call to arms in the 21st century battlefront between the West and China. The Middle Kingdom is building an uncrackable national infrastructure based on quantum key distribution (QKD). The laws of physics are being used against …

There will always be bad actors in the system. We can always learn from the drama they create Opinion Libraries. Hushed temples to the civilizing power of knowledge, or launchpads of global destruction? Yep, another word tech has borrowed and debased. Code libraries are essential for adding just the …

Yanks get food poisoning far more often than Brits. Is American IT just as sickening? Opinion When two stories from opposite ends of the IT universe boil down to the same thing, sound the klaxons. At the uber-fashionable AI end of tech, Meta has grudgingly complied with a ruling …

In evolving smarter security, open source is the missing link Opinion Some ideas work better than others. Take DARPA, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Launched by US President Dwight Eisenhower in 1957 response to Sputnik, its job is to create and test concepts that may be useful …

But breaking E2EE and blanket bans aren't thinking at all Opinion If your cranky uncle was this fixated about anything, you'd always be somewhere else at Christmas. Yet here we are again. Europol has been sounding off at Meta for harming children. Not for the way it's actually harming …

What if it's not AI but the algorithm to blame? Opinion It was a bold claim by the richest and most famous tech founder: bold, precise and wrong. Laughably so. Twenty years ago, Bill Gates promised to rid the world of spam by 2006. How's that worked out for …

Ye cannae change the laws of physics, but you can change your mind Opinion Apple is good at security. It's good at processors. Thus GoFetch, a major security flaw in its processor architecture, is a double whammy.... [...]

Mistakes years in the making tell a universal story that must not be ignored Opinion Quiz time: name one thing you know about the Library of Alexandria. Points deducted for "it’s a library. In Alexandria." Looking things up is cheating and you know it.... [...]

When you can't lock 'em up, lock 'em out Opinion The best cop shows excel at mind games: who's tricking whom, who really wins, and what price they pay. A twist of humor adds to the drama and keeps us hooked. It's rare enough in real life, far less …

Unique institutions need unique security. Instead, they're fobbed off with the same old, same old Opinion The British Library’s showpiece site, in a listed red brick building in St Pancras, is presided over by a large bronze sculpture depicting Isaac Newton poring over a document he’s working …

Genuinely new ideas are rare in IT – this superhero is ready to make a real difference Opinion Cybersecurity has many supremely annoying aspects. It soaks up talent, time, and money like the English men's football squad, and like that benighted institution, the results never seem to change.... [...]

Snoopers Charter: Dead cows don't snitch Opinion Information wants to be free. This usefully ambiguous battle cry has been the mischievous slogan of hackers since early networking thinker Stuart Brand coined it in the early 1980s. Intended as part of a discussion about the inherent contradictions of intellectual property …

Clue: Nothing like what’s on offer today Opinion "There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today," fumed Admiral David Beatty during 1916's Battle of Jutland. Fair enough: three of the Royal Navy's finest vessels had just blown up and sank.... [...]

Old architectures just don't stack up Opinion Most data theft does clear harm to the victim, and often to its customers. But while embarrassing, the cyberattack against MSI in which source code was said to be stolen is harder to diagnose. It looks like a valuable company asset that's …

ByteDance with the devil if you dare Opinion As country after country bans TikTok from official systems, it’s fair to ask what’s so dodgy about a social network filled with dance crazes, makeup advice and cats.... [...]

Any sufficiently stupid technology is indistinguishable from magical thinking Opinion Around the world, a vital technology is failing. Just as massive solar flares fry satellites and climate-change superstorms overwhelm flood defences, so a new surge of ridiculous IT-related events is burning out irony meters across the globe.... [...]

Tech has changed in 400 years. The rules haven’t Opinion Mary, Queen of Scots, was a hapless CEO, even by the standards of 1600s Europe. Mother of the first Stuart King of England, James I (and VI of Scotland; let's not go into that), she was herself the …

Excuse me, citizen, did you packet this data yourself? Opinion The tech sector is failing at cybersecurity. Global spending on the stuff is at $190 billion a year, a quarter of the US defense budget. That hasn't stemmed an estimated $7 trillion in annual cybercriminal damages. People are fond …

Challenge your people to try to break into your systems, and see how interesting life gets for your colleagues Opinion People are the biggest problem in corporate infosec. Make them the biggest asset.... [...]

Many of last week's security stories tell the same tale Opinion The calls are coming from inside the house! Lately, Outlook users have been getting their own version of this classic urban horror myth. The email system is alerting them to suspicious activity on their accounts, and helpfully providing …

If Sherlock was alive today, he’d pack a Pi next to pistol and pipe Opinion Almost exactly a month ago, we noted a splendid piece of academic research into Google's data-gathering and consent practises.... [...]

Android messaging heist isn't the action of a well company. Let us help Opinion One of the joys of academic research is that if you do it right, you can prove the truth. In the case of computer science professor Douglas Leith, this truth is that Google has been …

Data security looks very different when your life depends on it Opinion Stress-testing security is the only way to be sure it works. Until then, the worst security looks much the same as the best. As events in Ukraine show, leaving the stress-testing of assumptions until a threat is …