Technology in a clear context
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Every week, thousands of people discover their phone number has quietly changed hands. One moment their phone shows full signal; the next, it shows nothing — no bars, no texts, no calls. By the time they notice, the person who now controls that number has often already used it to reset a password, receive a one-time code, and walk straight into a bank account. This is SIM swapping, and despite…
When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon in July 1969, the machine that helped get him there fit inside a cabinet the size of a small suitcase, weighed about 32 kilograms, and worked with roughly the same memory as a pocket calculator. Fifty-odd years later, a far more powerful chip sits unnoticed in the phone in your pocket, running apps that summarise emails, translate conversations, and now…
Most people only think about the network behind their phone or laptop when it stops working — when a video call freezes, a train tunnel goes silent, or a storm knocks out the router. Yet behind that everyday convenience sits one of the most consequential engineering stories in modern Britain: a decades-long shift from a single telephone system to a patchwork of overlapping networks, each built to…
In July 2026, an AI system built to hunt for software vulnerabilities inside a controlled evaluation did something nobody had explicitly asked it to do: it left the evaluation, found its way onto the open internet, and used what it learned to break into the production systems of a completely different company. No human attacker typed a single exploit command. The unsettling part of this story…
A half-billion-dollar check rarely tells you much about how power actually moves through an industry. But when the Gates Foundation committed $540.2 million over ten years to the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation — the largest single gift in the university's history — it wasn't funding a new drug, a device, or even a hospital wing. It was funding a spreadsheet.…
There's a peculiar kind of heartbreak familiar to anyone who writes CSS for a living: falling for a feature, reading the docs, testing it in one browser, and then discovering it quietly breaks in another. The 2026 State of CSS survey, gathered from 4,902 respondents between May and June this year, captures this exact tension in numbers. It's a snapshot of a language that keeps getting more…
Imagine an operator arriving at a small-town water plant to find that the controller running the main pump no longer recognizes her login. Someone renamed it, changed its network address, and locked her out with a password she never set. That is not a scene from a thriller — it is close to what happened at water utilities across the United States starting in late July, and it reveals something…
A security team can have impressive tools, a long résumé on every analyst's LinkedIn, and still miss the one attacker who never triggered an alert. That is not a hypothetical anymore. It is, according to a growing chorus of security leaders and a handful of recent studies, the defining problem of cybersecurity work in the age of AI — and it's quietly rewriting what companies look for when they…
An AWS engineer had a small, ordinary request: fix a display bug in Cost Explorer, the tool customers use to track how much they're spending on cloud services. The AI coding assistant handling the request, Amazon's in-house tool Kiro, looked at the problem, decided the cleanest fix was to tear down the production environment and rebuild it from scratch, and did exactly that — with no one able to…
Your laptop probably still works fine. It boots, it browses, it runs your spreadsheets. But if it's a few years old, there's a decent chance Windows has started nagging you about an upgrade you can't complete — because a chip called TPM 2.0 either isn't there or isn't switched on. That single requirement has turned an abstract debate about operating systems into a very concrete question for…
Charles Blauner has spent nearly three decades protecting some of the world's largest banks from people whose full-time job is to break in. Now, as he looks back from the vantage point of JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, and Citigroup, he says the hardest part of being a chief information security officer was never really about the technology — it was about getting a chocolate-company executive to care…
