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Are we building sovereign AI infrastructure that is legally controlled but operationally fragile? The current conversation around sovereign AI is dominated by a sensible instinct, keep the models, data and compute that underpin critical national capability within national jurisdiction. Governments want AI infrastructure they control, regulate and can trust. Nice and tidy for the pen […]
March 8, 2026
As an avid fitness enthusiast, the modern ability to access personal metabolic and activity data has fascinated me ever since I first began exploring it more than 25 years ago. Anyone else remember the bulky Garmin Forerunner 101? How things have changed since then. With nearly half a lifetime of training data, now enriched by […]
January 16, 2026
I am starting to believe that ‘Sovereignty’ is becoming one of the most misused words in modern technology discourse. As digital infrastructure becomes geopolitical, vendors increasingly promise Sovereignty as a Service. The phrase is reassuring and often wrong. Let me start by providing some clarity, we need a clean and simple taxonomy. In the absence […]
December 9, 2025
An interesting question concerning the trustworthiness of technology, or perhaps more accurately those who control it, was raised out of my last missive, ‘Is Trust The Strategic Asset Democracy is Neglecting?’ that got me thinking. To start with let me lay that thinking out so you get the context, I am postulating that the defining […]
December 7, 2025
Following on the trust theme from my last missive – ‘How to Build a Dystopia – Start by Phoning HMRC About Your Neighbour’s‘, reflecting on modern democracies I perceive they are entering a period of structural stress. The issues are familiar, polarisation, disinformation, economic insecurity, failing services, collapsing faith in institutions, politicians putting party and […]
December 6, 2025
Once upon a time (or so we tell ourselves), reporting a suspicious neighbour to His Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) was pitched as some kind of civic virtue, help us catch tax dodgers, protect public coffers. On paper, a noble cause. In practice? The first step on a rickety road that leads straight into Orwell-land, […]
November 11, 2025
This week it was the turn of Cloudflare to have an outage enforcing a self-imposed denial of service on its customers that included OpenAI and Twitter. This follows AWS and Microsoft in recent weeks, events raising an increasingly urgent question – Do we now need a framework for Globally Systemically Important Technology Corporations, a G-SiTec […]
October 12, 2025
The weekends news has been full of the doom-mongers gurning at the AI boom or should we call it a bubble? Which got me thinkng, we have been here before have we not? When inflated expectations, fuelled by investor FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), surge to irrational heights before the inevitable correction. Then comes the […]
September 26, 2025
In cybersecurity and technology governance, we spend endless hours dissecting frameworks, controls and certifications. We argue over Zero Trust architectures, resilience models and assurance seals. Yet there is a much deeper, more uncomfortable layer to the story, one that no encryption algorithm or multi-factor authentication or audit can patch or detect. Our digital trust is […]
September 24, 2025
“The future arrives not with a whisper, but with an echo of mistakes we chose not to imagine.“ A storm is gathering in the world’s supply chains. Its name is Agentic AI (Artificial Intelligence). These autonomous systems, tasked with sourcing, negotiating, routing and optimising without human pause, are being heralded as the next great leap […]
September 16, 2025
In today’s democracies, facts are no longer neutral. They have become weapons. A statistic pulled from context, a story exaggerated beyond proportion or a meme sharpened into a blade can now be deployed as artillery in political trench warfare. The battlefield is not foreign soil, it is our own timelines, group chats and dinner tables, […]
September 14, 2025
Are you outraged by the endless stream of digital crimes, or have you become numb to them? The latest in a long line of global victims being the Jaguar Land Rover breach that has thrown its supply chain into turmoil, threatening small businesses and livelihoods, while at the same time KillSec ransomware has been reported […]
August 31, 2025
The trust theme in my last blog got me thinking about the pedestal Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being placed on. When Alan Turing proposed his famous Imitation Game in 1950, he asked a deceptively simple question, paraphrased as – “If a machine’s responses are indistinguishable from a human’s, should we call it intelligent?” For decades, […]
July 30, 2025
Following my last missive, I had some interesting feedback on a term I used in reference to compliance, that of ‘Theatre’. So to elucidate a bit on that theme … In boardrooms and audit committees across the world, the term cyber compliance gets thrown around like a magic talisman, invoked to satisfy regulators, reassure investors […]
July 29, 2025
How to Lose a Generation (and Your Cyber Credibility) … In a move that truly showcases the digital finesse of a damp teabag, Parliament has blessed us with the UK Online Safety Act 2023, yet another stroke of cyber brilliance, mandatory age verification on adult websites. Because nothing screams ‘we understand the internet’ like a […]
March 12, 2026
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