Throw a spanner in the works, best get good at fixing things. Now, where did you put that spanner? Opinion Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. This works well in sane times, less so when "but it's both" is the default. Apply it to …

Cut off one head and 100 grow back? Decapitation may not be the way to go Opinion With Apple pulling the plug on at-rest end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for UK users, and Signal threatening to pull out of Sweden if that government demands E2EE backdoors, it's looking bleak.... [...]

Lions juggling chainsaws are fun to watch, but you wouldn't want them trimming your trees Opinion Nobody likes The Man. When a traffic cop tells you to straighten up and slow down or else, profound thanks are rarely the first words on your lips. Then you drive past a …

Clear rules and guaranteed consequences concentrate the mind wonderfully. Just ask a Russian Opinion "As obsolete as warships in the Baltic" was a great pop lyric in Prefab Sprout's 1985 gem, Faron Young. Great, but ironically obsolete itself. Sweden has just deployed multiple warships in that selfsame sea to …

If 40 years of faulty building gets blown down, don’t rebuild with the rubble Opinion When a typhoon devastates a land, it takes a while to understand the scale of the destruction. Disaster relief kicks in, communications rebuilt, and news flows out. Salt Typhoon is no different.... [...]

2024's Tech Fail Roll Of Dishonor Opinion Happy new year! Tradition says that this is when we boldly look forward to what may happen in the 12 months to come. Do you really want to know that? Didn’t think so.... [...]

Mummy, where do zero days come from? Opinion One of the charms of coding is that malice can be indistinguishable from incompetence. Last week's Who, Me? story about financial transfer test software running amok is a case in point.... [...]

The politics of cybersecurity are too important to be left to the politicians Opinion Here's a front-page headline you won't see these days: CHINA'S SPIES ARE TAPPING OUR PHONES. Not that they're not – they are – but, like the environment, there's so much cybersecurity horror in the media that, yes …

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 …