The recurring theme this week seems to be around the gap between breaches happening and individual victims finding out about them. It's tempting to blame this on the corporate victim of the breach (the hacked company), but they're simultaneously dealing with a criminal intrusion, a ransom demand, and class-action lawyers knocking down their doors. They're in a lose-lose position: pay the ransom and fuel the criminals whilst still failing to escape regulatory disclosure obligations. Disclose earl...

Well, the ESP32 Bluetooth bridge experiment was a complete failure. Not the radios themselves, they're actually pretty cool, but there's just no way I could get the Yale locks to be reliably operated by them. At a guess, BLE is a bit too passive to detect state changes, and unless it was awake and communicating, it just had no idea what was happening with the locks. So, I've now silenced all lock-related alerts and am focusing on making the wifi network as reliable as possible in the hope the lo...

A big "thank you" to everyone who helped me troubleshoot the problem with my "Print Screen" button on the new PC. Try as we all might, none of us could figure out why it refused to bind to SnagIt and instead insisted on dumping the entire collection of screens to a file on the desktop. But an especailly big thanks to the follower who later emailed me with an idea that didn't work, and followed up with an idea that finally did! So, yeah, thanks Logitech for making this a real pain in the arse 🤦...

This week I'm in Hong Kong, and the day after recording, I gave the talk shown in the image above at INTERPOL's Cybercrime Expert Group. I posted a little about this on Facebook and LinkedIn, but thought I'd expand on what really stuck with me after watching other speakers: the effort agencies are putting into cybercrime prevention. It's very easy for folks to judge law enforcement solely on what they see from the outside, and that's mostly going after offenders and taking down criminal infrastr...

It's the discussion about the reaction of some people in the UK regarding their impending social media ban for under 16s that bugged me most. Most noteably was the hand-waving around "the gov is just trying to siphon up all our IDs" and "this means everyone will have to show ID, not just under 16s". If only there was another precedent somewhere in the world where precisely this model was rolled... oh - wait! 🐨 The way the ban (sorry - "delay") has been done in Australia isn't perfect, but it al...

I thought Scott would cop it first when he posted about what his solar system really cost him last year. "You're so gonna get that stupid AI-slop response from some people", I joked. But no, he got other stupid responses instead! And I got the AI-slop responses! Draw your own conclusions on those comments, but I find it fascinating that the one thing people would take away from a thoughtful blog post I spent many hours writing to explain how much work I put into privacy is that the illustration...

I’m in Oslo! Flighty is telling me I’ve flown in or out of here 43 times since a visit in 2014 set me on a new path professionally and, many years later, personally. It’s special here, like a second home that just feels… right. This week, the business end of things is about the WhiteDate data breach. Seeking a partner along common racial lines isn’t unusual, but… well… WhiteDate is anything but usual. And, just for fun, see if you can pick the thing that garnered the most negative feedback about...

Remember the Ashley Madison data breach? That was now more than a decade ago, yet it arguably remains the single most noteworthy data breach of all time. There are many reasons for this accolade, but chief among them is that by virtue of the site being expressly designed to facilitate extramarital affairs, there was massive social stigma attached to it. As a result, we saw some pretty crazy stuff: 1. Various websites were stood up to publicly disclose the presence of people in the data and out...

15 mins and 40 seconds. That's how long it took to troubleshoot the first tech problem of 2026, and that's how far you'll need to skip through this video to hear the audio at normal volume. The problem Scott and I had is analogous to the troubleshooting so many of us do in our roles day in and day out: 1. This should work fine 2. It doesn't work, and I don't know why 3. I did something that seems unrelate,d and now it works 4. I still don't know why Anyway, I've cleaned up the audio-only v...

I think the start of this week's video really nailed it for the techies amongst us: shit doesn't work, you change something random and now shit works and yu have no idea why 🤷‍♂️ Such was my audio this week and apoligise to those of you watching the video below for the first few mins (although I managed to clean up the audio-only podcast version). Ironically, doing things non-standard at home was intended to iron out the creases before the impending travel so... a week from now when I do this w...