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When we think of the internet, we usually imagine a borderless, decentralised cloud, a digital utopia where information flows freely, connecting the whole of humanity. But this image is a comforting illusion. In reality, the internet is a physical, political, and economic entity. It has a geography, and that geography is starting to look unsettingly familiar. Beneath the oceans lie the true arteries of the digital world, a sprawling network of submarine fiber-optic cables. Look at a map of these cables, and you’ll see the faint outlines of 19th-century shipping routes. These modern data highways, much like the trade routes are not built for universal connected but for strategic advantage. They connect powerful economic hubs in the Global North, while often bypassing or merely extracting from the Global South. ...

I am going to try to convince you to start writing. Not because I’m some seasoned author, but because I’m someone who just started two weeks ago, and I wish I’d started sooner. The reason I started writing might surprise you: Artificial Intelligence. In an age where AI can write poetry, craft emails, and even generate entire novels, I decided to start writing. And by the end of this post, I hope you’ll understand why this isn’t as deranged as it sounds and why you should join me. ...

What does it mean to be Secure? You lock your front door every night. You check it twice before bed, maybe even give it a gentle tug to make sure it’s really latched. You feel secure. You sleep soundly, confident that you’ve taken all the necessary precautions to protect yourself. But are you really secure? What if I told you that while you were checking your front door for the third time, a stranger was sitting in a coffee shop across town, effortlessly accessing your bank account through that public Wi-Fi network you connected to earlier? Or that smart doorbell you installed to make your home more secure is currently streaming video to servers you’ve never heard of, in countries you’ve never visited? ...

I’m Zubair, a Computer Science student specialising in Cyber security at The University of York. This is my attempt to turn scribbles and half-finished notes into something useful. What I’ve come to realise is that, learning to express what’s swirling around in my head, explaining it on the page - is as important for me as it might be for anyone reading. Sharing those experiences, both the wins and the face plants is one of the best ways to learn, because articulating a thought often reveals gaps I didn’t even know were there. I sketched “The Content wheel” to show what you’ll find on this blog, a circle divided into five uneven slices. Each slice represents a broad category of posts but none of them are polished or final, just snapshots of my journey. Projects & Experiments, represents the hands-on side of my work. These are the moments when I set up a test environment, ran into unexpected errors while configuring a lab, or discovered that a single misconfigured rule could break an entire network. ...