$ ls writing/ -lt
writing.
Notes from the desk, not thought leadership. Specifics over slogans. If a piece couldn't earn its keep at a kitchen table, it didn't make it here.
Total · 201 pieces
Latest · 2026·10·10 Page · 4 / 9 Locale · en_GB
License · CC BY 4.0
2026·06·04
The digital footprint we create for children, three years on Revisiting the 2023 post on children's digital footprints, with what has actually changed by 2026 — the Children's Code enforcement, generative AI making the training-set argument operational, and Smartphone Free Childhood moving the position to the mainstream. privacy · children · series · update
7 min
2026·06·03
Securing Your Home Network to Protect Your Family Harden your router, deploy DNS-level content filtering, segment your network for children's devices and IoT, and schedule internet access — a practical guide for parents. tutorial · defence · home-network · families · dns · filtering · parenting · router
20 min
2026·06·02
A Parent's Guide to Spotting Phishing and Social Engineering Your children receive the same phishing messages you do, with less experience recognising them. This guide teaches you what to look for and how to explain it. tutorial · defence · phishing · social-engineering · families · parenting · education
10 min tutorial
2026·06·02
A cyber strategy for UK small business: the foundations Part one of a four-part cyber strategy for UK SMBs to run in the second half of 2026: three frameworks — Cyber Essentials, Cyber Essentials Plus and ISO 27001 — nested into one spine, plus the two decisions everything hangs on: scope and ownership. cyber essentials · iso 27001 · small business
9 min
2026·05·30
The week in cyber — 25 to 29 May 2026 GCHQ's director on a 'moment of consequence', the TrapDoor supply chain campaign reaching into AI coding assistants, the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill still grinding through Report Stage, and quantum quietly becoming a 2026 planning item. weekly · governance · ned · board
6 min
2026·05·27
What is AI in 2026 One word is doing too much work. What people actually mean when they say "AI" in 2026 — neural networks, NLP, LLMs, generative AI, and agentic AI — what each one is, and which conversation you are actually in. ai · explainer · governance · board · series
22 min
2026·05·23
The nine-second problem An AI agent took nine seconds to delete a production database and its backups. The agent did what it was authorised to do. That is the finding. ai · governance · ned
4 min
2026·05·23
The week in cyber — 18 to 22 May 2026 A self-spreading npm worm, a government letter that boards should read, and the second-quietest Patch Tuesday in two years. What the past working week looked like through a UK board lens. weekly · governance · ned · board
6 min
2026·05·22
The regulator pivot Four documents in May, from four different parts of the UK regulatory apparatus, tell one story. ICO five-step guide. BoE/FCA/HMT joint statement. Cabinet Office letter. South Staffordshire Water fine. The polite phase is over. regulation · ico · governance · ai
6 min
2026·05·19
The agent age and the analyst in the loop Post 21 of the AI series, and the closing piece. Where this is heading. The agent age has arrived; the analyst is still in the loop; the architectural decisions that made EmilyAI durable are now the wider field's emerging consensus. What I will be writing about next. ai · soc · series · closing
8 min
2026·05·18
Backup Strategy for a Small Business: The 3-2-1 Rule in Practice Three copies, two media, one offsite. Everyone knows the rule. Almost nobody tests the restore. tutorial · defence · backup · small-business · disaster-recovery · resilience
12 min tutorial
2026·05·16
The week in cyber — 11 to 15 May 2026 A self-spreading npm worm hit TanStack, Patch Tuesday had its quietest month in two years, the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill moved to Report Stage, and the ICO issued a five-step plan boards should actually read. weekly · governance · ned · board
6 min
2026·05·15
Deploying Wazuh for Home and Small Business — All-in-One Server with Linux, Windows and macOS Agents Build a complete SIEM and endpoint detection platform with the Wazuh all-in-one server on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS or Docker on Windows, then deploy agents across Linux, Windows and macOS. tutorial · defence · wazuh · siem · monitoring · ubuntu · windows · macos · security
30 min
2026·05·14
Things I wish boards would actually ask Twelve questions that would tell you more than any maturity score. None of them mention zero-trust. governance · ned · board
7 min
2026·05·12
Configure Fail2Ban: Protecting Linux Services from Brute Force Install and configure Fail2Ban on Ubuntu to protect SSH, Apache and other services with rate-limiting and IP banning. tutorial · defence · fail2ban · linux · hardening · ssh
10 min
2026·05·11
April 2026, in retrospect The worst single month for cyber attacks on record. 105 publicly disclosed ransomware incidents globally. The UK third by volume. Looking back at it with a week's distance, three patterns matter more than the count. retrospective · ransomware · attribution · governance
7 min
2026·05·09
The week in cyber — 4 to 8 May 2026 The ICO fined South Staffordshire Water nearly £1m, the DSIT cyber newsletter quietly confirmed the regulatory direction of travel, and the Canvas extortion played out on a public timeline. weekly · governance · ned · board
5 min
2026·05·04
The £320 myth: what Cyber Essentials actually costs Cyber Essentials is marketed from £320. For an unprepared 10-person UK business under the new v3.3 Danzell question set, the true first-year cost is £13,000 to £30,000 over 10 to 14 weeks. Here is the breakdown. cyber essentials · small business · ned · board · governance
9 min
2026·05·02
The week in cyber — 27 April to 1 May 2026 A learning platform serving thirty million people was breached, cPanel disclosed a zero-day that had been live in the wild for months, and April closed as the worst month for ransomware on record. weekly · governance · ned · board
5 min
2026·04·25
The week in cyber — 20 to 24 April 2026 NCSC and CISA named the Beijing-based outfit running covert botnets, the UK cyber chief told businesses to brace, and a sitting MP's website was hit with 142 million requests. A busy week. weekly · governance · ned · board
6 min
2026·04·18
What it changed about my other machines Last in the six-post series on the Covert Cyber Deck. The deck as catalyst, not destination — what designing and living with it changed about how I look at my work laptop, my home network, the firm's estate, and the boards I advise. cyberdeck · reflection · governance · sovereignty
6 min
2026·04·14
Six years of EmilyAI: what we kept, what we changed, what we should have done sooner Post 20 of the AI series. A longer reflective piece. Eight years on from the first sketch of the system that became EmilyAI, six years on from production deployment, the architectural retrospective the series has been building toward. ai · soc · retrospective · emilyai · series
9 min
2026·04·07
Incident Response Planning for a Small Business Without a SOC You do not need a security operations centre to have a plan. You need a single page, an out-of-band phone number, and a Saturday morning. tutorial · defence · incident-response · small-business · governance · planning
12 min tutorial
2026·04·04
Healthcare's reckoning Three months of attacks have produced a clarifying set of numbers. £32.7m at Synnovis. 150,000 households warned at NHS Dumfries and Galloway. At least one patient death attributed. Healthcare is where concentration risk meets the lowest acceptable downtime threshold. healthcare · ransomware · governance · cni
7 min
2026·04·02
In defence of writing the code yourself On staying technical while sitting in chairs that don't expect you to be. ned · craft · operator
5 min
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