A feminist argument against weakening encryption
Attacks on encryption continue. The UK government has just reportedly handed Apple a Technical Capability Notice – effectively demanding that Apple allow UK law enforcement access to their users’...
View ArticleThe Online Safety Bill: Reboot it, or Shoot it?
Yesterday I took part in a panel discussion organised by the Adam Smith Institute on the Online Safety Bill. This sprawling legislative monster has outlasted not just six Secretaries of State for...
View ArticleInfrastructure – the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Infrastructure used to be regulated and boring; the phones just worked and water just came out of the tap. Software has changed all that, and the systems our society relies on are ever more complex and...
View ArticleThree Paper Thursday – Analysing social networks within underground forums
One would be hard pressed to find an aspect of life where networks are not present. Interconnections are at the core of complex systems – such as society, or the world economy – allowing us to study...
View Article2019 Cambridge Cybercrime Conference
I’m at the fourth Cambridge Cybercrime Conference, which I will try to liveblog in followups to this post.
View ArticleSHB 2019 – Liveblog
I’ll be trying to liveblog the twelfth workshop on security and human behaviour at Harvard. I’m doing this remotely because of US visa issues, as I did for WEIS 2019 over the last couple of days. Ben...
View ArticleHow Protocols Evolve
Over the last thirty years or so, we’ve seen security protocols evolving in different ways, at different speeds, and at different levels in the stack. Today’s TLS is much more complex than the early...
View ArticleSecurity and Human Behavior 2018
I’m at the 2018 Workshop on Security and Human Behavior which is being held this year at Carnegie Mellon University. For background, the workshop liveblogs and websites from 2008–17 are linked here. As...
View ArticleDon’t blame Cambridge for Facebook’s privacy crisis
Mark Zuckerberg tried to blame Cambridge University in his recent testimony before the US Senate, saying “We do need to understand whether there was something bad going on in Cambridge University...
View ArticleSecurity and Human Behaviour 2017
I’m liveblogging the Workshop on Security and Human Behaviour which is being held here in Cambridge. The programme is here. For background, see the liveblogs for SHB 2008-15 which are linked here. Blog...
View ArticleVideo on Edge
John Brockman of Edge interviewed me in London in March. The video of the interview, and a transcript, are now available on the Edge website. Edge runs big interviews with several dozen scientists a...
View ArticleCambridge Cybercrime Conference
I’m sitting in the Inaugural Cybercrime Conference of the Cambridge Cloud Cybercrime Centre, and will attempt to liveblog the talks in followups to this post.
View ArticleSecurity and Human Behaviour 2016
I’m liveblogging the Workshop on Security and Human Behaviour which is being held in Harvard. The programme is here. For background, see the liveblogs for SHB 2008-15 which are linked here and here....
View ArticleOur Christmas message for troublemakers: how to do anonymity in the real world
On the 5th of December I gave a talk at a journalists’ conference on what tradecraft means in the post-Snowden world. How can a journalist, or for that matter an MP or an academic, protect a...
View ArticleSpooks behaving badly
Like many in the tech world, I was appalled to see how the security and intelligence agencies’ spin doctors managed to blame Facebook for Lee Rigby’s murder. It may have been a convenient way of...
View ArticleSecurity and Human Behaviour 2014
I’m liveblogging the Workshop on Security and Human Behaviour which is being held here in Cambridge. The participants’ papers are here and the programme is here. For background, see the liveblogs for...
View ArticleSmall earthquake, not many dead (yet)
The European Court of Justice decision in the Google case will have implications way beyond search engines. Regular readers of this blog will recall stories of banks hounding innocent people for money...
View ArticleCrypto festival video
We had a crypto festival in London in London in November at which a number of cryptographers and crypto policy folks got together with over 1000 mostly young attendees to talk about what might be done...
View ArticleWe’re hiring
We have a vacancy for a postdoc to work on the psychology of cybercrime and deception for two years from October. It might suit someone with a PhD in psychology or behavioural economics with a...
View ArticlePsychology of deception
I’m at SARMAC, a conference with a number of research papers on the psychology of lying and lie detection. I’ll liveblog the relevant sessions in followups.
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