Normally, when someone sends feedback like this, I ignore it, but it happens often enough that it deserves an explainer, because the answer is really, really simple. So simple, in fact, that it should be evident to the likes of Bruce, who decided his misunderstanding deserved a 1-star Trustpilot review
Well, I now have the answer to how Snapchat does age verification for under-16s: they give an underage kid the ability to change their date of birth, then do a facial scan to verify. The facial scan (a third party tells me...) allows someone well under 16 to pass it
I gave up on the IoT water meter reader. Being technical and thinking you can solve everything with technology is both a blessing and a curse; dogged persistence has given me the life I have today, but it has also burned serious amounts of time because I never want to
This week, it was an absolute privilege to be at Europol in The Hague, speaking about cyber offenders and at the InterCOP conference and spending time with some of the folks involved in the Operation Endgame actions. The latter in particular gave me a new sense of just how much
What. A. Week. It wasn't just the preceding weeks of technical pain as we tried to work out how to get this data loaded, it was all the subsequent queries we had to deal with too. Some of them are totally understandable, whilst others just resulted in endless
I hate hyperbolic news headlines about data breaches, but for the "2 Billion Email Addresses" headline to be hyperbolic, it'd need to be exaggerated or overstated - and it isn't. It's rounded up from the more precise number of 1,957,476,
The 2 billion email address stealer log breach I talk about this week is almost ready to go at the time of writing. It's been massively time-consuming, massively expensive (we turned the cloud up to 11) and enormously frustrating. I've written about why in the draft
Tracking down bugs in software is a pain that all of us who write code must bear. When we're talking about outright errors in a web page, you typically have something to get you started (such as output in the console), but that wasn't the case
It was the Synthient threat data that ate most of my time this week, and it continues to do so now, the weekend after recording this video. Data like this is equal parts enormously damaging to victims and frustratingly noisy to process. I have to be confident enough that it&
Where is your data on the internet? I mean, outside the places you've consciously provided it, where has it now flowed to and is being used and abused in ways you've never expected? The truth is that once the bad guys have your data, it often
You're not going to believe this - the criminals that took the Qantas data ignored the injunction 😮 I know, I know, we're all a bit stunned that making crime illegal hasn't appeared to stop it, but here we are. Just before the time
This week's video was recorded on Friday morning Aussie time, and as promised, hackers dumped data the following day. Listening back to parts of the video as I write this on a Sunday morning, pretty much what was predicted happened: data was dumped, it included Qantas, and the
You see it all the time after a tragedy occurs somewhere, and people flock to offer their sympathies via the "thoughts and prayers" line. Sympathy is great, and we should all express that sentiment appropriately. The criticism, however, is that the line is often offered as a substitute
This probably comes through pretty strongly in this week's video, but I love the vibe at CERN. It's a place so focused on the common good of science that all the other cultural attributes that often put people at odds these days fade into the distance.
It's hard to explain the significance of CERN. It's the birthplace of the World Wide Web and the home of the largest machine ever built, the Large Hadron Collider. The bit that's hard to explain is, well, I mean, look at it!
Charlotte and
I'm so happy to finally be getting those HIBP demos out! The first couple are simple, but as I say in this week's vid, it's the simple questions we're still dealing with. As if to taunt me (or prove my point), we
One of the most common use cases for HIBP's API is querying by email address, and we support hundreds of millions of searches against this endpoint every month. Loads of organisations use this service to understand the exposure of their customers and provide them with better protection against
Imagine jumping on board a class action after your precious datas have been breached, then sticking through it all the way until a settlement is reached. Then, finally, after a long and arduous battle, cashing in and getting... $1. Well, kinda $1, the ParkMobile class action granted up to $1
Well, one of them is, but what's important is that we now have a platform on which we can start pushing out a lot more. It's not that HIBP is a particularly complex system that needs explaining in any depth, but we still get a lot
So I had this idea around training a text-to-speech engine with my voice, then using that to speak over the Sonos at home to announce AI-driven events, such as people ringing the doorbell. A few hours' worth of video from these weekly updates fed into ElevenLabs and wammo! Here
