A career in journalism can be unsafe regardless of where you are in the world. There are plenty of reasons as to why journalists may want to educate themselves on cybersecurity. Your interviews and investigative stories may be of interest to nation-state actors, private entities, and other parties. It would be best if you made sure that key information isn’t leaked or stolen from your device. Here are key reasons why journalists need to prioritize cybersecurity. Protect Your Identity. As a journalist, you may need to protect your identity from authorities who might be trying to kill a story ..read more

Recently, I received a broadcast message from my online neighborhood chat room news feed. An autistic neighbor was soliciting donations for “medically necessary and lifesaving” top surgery.1 Before researching this article, I would have had no idea what “top surgery” was. Essentially, plastic surgeons transform a biological male chest into a transgender female chest, or vice versa. (Many transgenders undergo “bottom surgery” too.)2 Two neighbors responded online. The first suggested therapy first as a young person is likely to change their mind a lot by middle age. The second asked how top su ..read more

One of the timeless Christian hymns of the Reformation era is Joachim Neander’s ‘Loben den Herre’, translated by Catherine Winkworth as ‘Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of Creation’. Both the original German – and its nineteenth-century reversion – speak powerfully of the importance of depending not on our own connivings, but on the providence of God. The verses begin: Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of creation; O my soul, praise him, for he is thy health and salvation: … Praise to the Lord, who o’er all things so wondrously reigneth, Shelters thee under his wings ..read more

The history of science is not without its weirder chapters. A few years ago, while half through my undergraduate degree, I sat down with a computer science friend of mind (I was a humanities student, I must sadly admit) and had perhaps one of the most surreal conversations. Without context, the term Roko’s Basilisk sounds like something out of a weird science fiction film like Blade Runner or The Terminator, but I can assure you it is weirder than just that. For some real context, Roko’s Basilisk is a computer science thought experiment about the risks in the development of Artificial Intelli ..read more

As restrictions continue, the oft-repeated mantra – “just three weeks to flatten the curve” – that has clearly become  a control mechanism, which may be deployed at a moment’s notice at the whim of government.  Whatever your views are on how, when and why Covid 19 reached our shores, and how one modelling graph from Imperial College (now understood to have been hugely inaccurate) facilitated the arrival of globalised measures to deal with the pandemic, it’s not the mockingbird media machine or big tech and global governments which are up for immediate debate here. What is up for dis ..read more

Article submitted on 18 August 2021. The recent withdrawal of the U.S. and its ally forces from Afghanistan has been nothing short of being consequential. The ambiguity of Afghanistan’s future has already been deemed a loss for the U.S. thanks to extensive media coverage and the Taliban’s rapid conquest of the nation, despite Secretary of State Antony Blinken declaring it a successful mission. Regardless, it has become clear that Afghanistan remains a graveyard for progress as it was for empires. Blinken’s public optimism is not wholly derived from the Biden administration’s over-confidence i ..read more

A dystopian new report exploring a range of invasive human augmentation technologies, including germ line and somatic modification, brain interfaces and … has been released by the German Bundeswehr and UK Ministry of Defence. The report, Human Augmentation – the Dawn of a New Paradigm claims to offer a conceptual model for thinking about human augmentation, an overview of how the technology will develop, and looks to apply these insights not just to the defence sector, but to society as a whole. A Dark New World The authors of the paper trace a common thread between technologies tha ..read more

In an exclusive interview with Nathan Wilson for Technical Politics, Professor Michael Plummer, Director of Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) discussed the economic development of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), as well as topics such as the Biden Administration’s approach to the region, his thoughts on the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), and the ongoing Myanmar sanctions. Prof. Plummer started his career as an economist after receiving a doctorate in economics from the University of Michigan. Subsequently, he worked as a Pro ..read more

The world, as we know it to be today, is a global village. This is made possible with the availability of information through people and culture’s interconnectivity since the Internet’s advent. Unlike how things were in the 1960s when communication theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the term “global village,” technology has changed the way the world operates. Crucial sectors, such as health, education, transportation, security, economy, and governance, have experienced transformation through technological disruption. Talking in smaller settings like the home, we have Internet of Things (IoT) te ..read more

Since 2017, over a million Uyghurs and members of other Turkic Muslim minorities have disappeared into a vast network of ‘re-education’ camps. Detainees are subjected to political indoctrination, forced labour, coerced into renouncing their religion and culture and, are in many instances subjected to torture, rape and organ harvesting. Women in and outside the camps are regularly the victims of forced sterilisation and abortion. Thousands of mosques and shrines, including protected sites, have been damaged or demolished since 2016. Around half of Uyghur households are ‘paired’ with a Party me ..read more