I’ve discovered that the best way to avoid working is to write a newsletter about work. It’s meta-procrastination. My therapist would be proud if I could afford one after this week’s Claude bill.
Grizzly Bears Understand Infrastructure Better Than Most CISOs
Canada fenced a highway through grizzly country, built 44 crossings, and watched collisions drop 80%. Now mothers teach cubs to use them.
Got me thinking about security architecture. If our systems were build in this way where it’s intuitive and doing the safe thing is the easy thing, you’d need to spend less hours training. There were no posters for the bears reminding them to “Think Before You Cross.” Just infrastructure that actually works for who lives there.
Canada built 44 bridges and tunnels across a single stretch of highway so that animals could cross without dying, and collisions with wildlife there have fallen by more than 80%, with grizzly mothers now teaching their cubs to use the crossings like a route the family has always known
MikroTik Routers, Still Not Tik’ing Along
New RouterOS flaws are being exploited to hijack routers. Again. If you’re keeping score at home, this is approximately the 47th time MikroTik devices have become someone else’s problem.
At some point we need to accept that certain kit is just attack surface with a power cable.
Nobody’s Tested What Happens When the Food Stops
The UK food supply chain relies on private firms to manage their own resilience. The National Audit Office just noticed no one’s stress-tested what happens when everything fails at once.
Spoiler: it’s not great. But at least we’ll all be equally hungry whilst waiting for the risk assessment to clear committee.
Resilience of the food supply chain to disruptions
Harvest Now, Decrypt Later (And You’re Already Late)
Quantum computers aren’t here yet, but adversaries are already stealing your encrypted data to crack later. The countdown started years ago, which means whatever you’ve been sending since about 2020 is currently sitting in someone’s “deal with this in 2030” folder.
Sleep well.
https://blog.knowbe4.com/why-your-security-program-needs-a-quantum-upgrade-now-1
26,000 Vulnerabilities Found, 202 Fixed
Anthropic found 26,153 vulnerabilities in five months. Only 202 got fixed. Turns out you can’t automate your way past the bit where humans have to actually care enough to patch things.
We’ve successfully industrialised finding problems. Solving them remains artisanal.
https://www.vulncheck.com/blog/anthropic-glasswing-receipts
Deplatformed Without a Country
An artist’s website vanishes overnight. No trial, no appeal, no recourse. A US government decision, enforced globally, took out an Italian hosting provider and everyone on it.
If you’re not in America, you have zero defence. If you are in America, you have slightly more than zero. Sovereignty is apparently a legacy concept.
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2026/09/08/Emily-Got-Canceled
AI Graduates to Organised Crime
Criminals are now stealing AI models and ransoming them back. Somewhere in a vendor pitch deck, this exact scenario was listed under “potential use cases we definitely thought through.”
The compliance officer you heard screaming earlier has been sedated and is resting comfortably.
—
That’s your lot. If you enjoyed this or violently disagreed with any of it, hit reply. I read them all, usually whilst pretending to be on a important call.
Otherwise, find me on Mastodon or occassionaly BlueSky where I’m having the same arguments but with worse punctuation.
Stay cynical.