Weekly update

15 mins and 40 seconds. That's how long it took to troubleshoot the first tech problem of 2026, and that's how far you'll need to skip through this video to hear the audio at normal volume. The problem Scott and I had is analogous to the troubleshooting so many of us do in our roles day in and day out: 1. This should work fine 2. It doesn't work, and I don't know why 3. I did something that seems unrelate,d and now it works 4. I still don't know why Anyway, I've cleaned up the audio-only v...

I think the start of this week's video really nailed it for the techies amongst us: shit doesn't work, you change something random and now shit works and yu have no idea why 🤷‍♂️ Such was my audio this week and apoligise to those of you watching the video below for the first few mins (although I managed to clean up the audio-only podcast version). Ironically, doing things non-standard at home was intended to iron out the creases before the impending travel so... a week from now when I do this w...

Building out an IoT environment is a little like the old Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. All the stuff on the top is only any good if all the stuff on the bottom is good, starting with power. This week, I couldn't even get that right, but thankfully, sparky to rescue and ensuite underfloor heating disconnected, and we now have reliable power again. On top of that is the layer that has increasingly been my nemesis - the network. Two days after recording, I've just spent the better part of the entire...

Perhaps it's just the time of year where we all start to wind down a bit, or maybe I'm just tired after another massive 12 months, but this week's vid is way late. Ok, going away to the place that had just been breached (ironic!) didn't help, but I think in general the pace we've maintained this year just needs to come back a bit. That said, I'll try to get this week's and next week's out on time, then it's off on travels for the next four weeks after that. Stay tuned for more IoT problems in a...

Twelve years (and one day) since launching Have I Been Pwned, it's now a service that Charlotte and I live and breathe every day. From the first thing every morning to the last thing each day, from holidays to birthdays, in sickness and in heal... wait a minute - did we marry each other or a data breach service?! We decided to do a 12th-birthday special together today to give everyone a bit more insight into what she does and what life is like running this service. It's a different weekly vid, a...

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 easily. So, is that control "reasonable"? I guess that will depend on whether this case is an outlier or a much more common scenario, and a sample set of one isn't particularly scientific. Either way, I expect that what we're seeing...

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 let a problem go unsolved. But sometimes, common sense and the ROI of my time have to prevail, so I packed up all the gear and went back to processing data breaches. If you happen to solve this problem in a way that doesn't require...

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 coordination is involved in this sort of operation, all the way down to some of the messaging in the videos they've since released. I've seen some social commentary on these already, check them out and see what you think,...

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 facepalms 🤦‍♂️ But we got there in the end with the worst of it just being a 24-hour period where we ended up on a SpamCop block list, for reasons I still don't understand. We are still on the very tail end of sending individual notificati...

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 blog post, but once you get to the point of inserting billions of records into a system with lots of billions of records, most of the usual way we'd do things totally goes out the window. I think we're looking at Wednesday morning Eu...