The enigma machine was ground-breaking for its time. It was an electromechanical device that used three rotors and a series of plugs to encode messages. The brilliance of the device was that the letter L in the same message could be represented by multiple letters. So the word “ALL” could come out as “EQA”. The combination of the rotors and plug boards meant that there were 150 million million (no, that is not a typo, it is million twice) possible combinations.

In an article published by Engadget today, they reveal that the US border forces are seizing Americans’ phone data and storing it for 15 years. To the toon of as many as 10,000 Americans every year.

Imagine combining “geofence warrants”, with data on social media, with algorithms powered by Artificial Intelligence. It is now possible to write a piece of software that searches social media for posts that the software deems threatening, then reaching out to Google’s servers to find out where the person is in real time, then notifying the police that the person might be on their way to commit a crime.

Astroscale will test the spacecraft's ability to snatch a satellite and bring it down toward the Earth's atmosphere, where it will burn up. It will do this in a series of different maneuvers, with the mission expected to end in September or October of this year.

That plug in wifi security camera that you bought might be streaming the video from your front porch for the entire world to see. Many of those cameras come with a default user id and password set at the factory. Which means that the entire world can see what you’re pointing it at if you don’t change the password.

On August 4th, 1945 the Soviet Union presented Averell Harriman, American Ambassador in Russia, with a gift. It was beautiful carving of the American eagle. The Ambassador, taken with the work of art, hung it in his residential study, where it stayed for seven years.

Here is a brilliant deepfake of the Queen’s annual Christmas message. It demonstrates how convincing the technology has become. I touch on this in my novel, China Rising, and the danger that it poses to our political system. While the technology is poised to become mainstream in the coming years, I fear that we are unprepared to deal with the fallout.

In each of my novels I encrypt the dedication using a different methodology each time. If you like puzzles, you’ll find this true story fascinating. A team of three amateur cryptographers solved the Zodiak killer’s cypher. Learn how they did it in this amazing video.

I always loved to read the newspaper. Even as a kid, I would scour our local paper after my father finished reading it. What I didn’t know way back then, was just how important the people behind the written word were to a democracy. To our way of life.

Richard Browning wanted to fly. The intrepid inventor experimented, tested, and developed an incredible device, the Gravity Suit. Check out his Ted Talk and I promise you’ll be amazed at his story.

Back in the day, hacking was easy.

I recall when I started my career as a finance person in the 90’s that few if anyone password protected their computer. My boss and I were working late on a Sunday night preparing for a Monday morning meeting with the executive team. He found a typo on one of the summary documents that was going to get a lot of visibility. The analyst who had worked on that file had it saved on his desktop, was away for the weekend, and unreachable, so my boss went to his desk and turned on his machine.

A short Q&A Session with author Paul Sande about his debut novel In the Name of Peace.

He talks about the inspiration for the book, the main themes in the story, and the reason he decided to use a real person in the book.

A reader reached out via Facebook to share her disgust at how I portrayed the people of Newfoundland in my novel, In the Name of Peace.. “I found your take on us to be extremely offensive,” were the exact words.

In 2015 Samsung debuted the Invisible Truck. The concept was quite simple, they put a big screen TV on the back of an eighteen wheeler and some wireless cameras on the front. The result is that you can see “through” the truck! The idea being that you make it easier for people to safely pass a truck, particularly on two lane highways.

Admittedly, I was about a minute into this video before I realized it said “Bosstown Dynamics” and not the famed Massachusetts based company called “Boston Dynamics.” So while the video is fake, the concept is really not far from being reality. The producers of the video did a brilliant job of bringing the robot to life and making the viewer feel empathy for it. As AI continues to develop, the prospect of a robot army is very real. Are we ready?

Steganography is the practice of hiding a message within a message, which is a form of cryptography. A common practice is coding text within a photo. In the digital age it became easy to do this with video, music, or even text files. You can use software to encode your secret message into the binary of the file, then use the same software to decode it.

At the front of In the Name of Peace is a dedication written in binary. It’s very easy to decode, just go to the following site:

I’m not embarrassed to admit that I had to google the meaning of the word “bespoke” (it mean’s “custom,” by the way) because it isn’t a word in common usage. Although since discovering their site, I’ve suddenly heard the word spoken on the news and in articles online. Funny, that.

While promoting my book one of the services replied that my cover was “not workable.” It forced me to take a good hard look at my cover and compare it to other thrillers. I swallowed my pride and I hired Peter and Caroline O’Connor of Bespoke Book Covers. In a few weeks I’ll be reposing my novel with a brand new cover.

When I decided two years ago to make him a background character in the novel, I recognized that it was a risk. Given who he was (is?), clearly he lived in danger every day. In the novel his death was a precipitating event. So when the headlines came in late July and early August, I wondered if I should replace him with a made up terrorist mastermind.