Here's a quick reminder that some parking rules are made for very valid reasons. Can you see the harm caused by this driver? Scroll down for a closer look.
Think before you park illegally
Prostate Cancer Diary Day One (of how many?)
When I woke up today I found I was thinking about prostate cancer treatment; not just my prostate cancer treatment, about which I must make a decision in the next few days, but prostate cancer in general. More specifically, my mind was going over the timing of that treatment and as I put on my dressing gown and headed for the stairs, the term lackadaisical came to mind, What a strange a word that is. I should look it up in the OED.
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| Prostate cancer (PCa) under a microscope |
But when I got downstairs, I remembered something else: I need to reconfigure the WiFi. Most of our devices work fine, except the printer, and I need the printer to make paper copies of the latest correspondence from the urologist.
I didn't fix the printer this yesterday, when I realized there was a problem, because my partner, CC, was using the Internet at the time. That would not have been a big deal six or seven years ago, but these days CC suffers from chronic fatigue and is cognitively impaired due to two brain haemorrhages and an insidious genetic condition. She also sleeps until nine in the morning most days and so stuff like reconfiguring the WiFi router is best done then.
Today, by the time I made my cereal and coffee and sat down to catch up on email and news, I could already hear CC getting up to go to the bathroom. When that happens I listen for her to walk back to her room because, if she is not planning to go back to sleep, she will typically call downstairs to ask for a beverage. Today she requested a ginger ale, not the usual tea or hot chocolate. I took her a glass of GA and decided to do the WiFi tomorrow.
Which was fine because I need to write down the big idea I had when I woke up this morning thinking about the days that have passed between the various stages of my prostate cancer diagnosis and treatment. The idea? Write a diary!
Yes, I know writing a diary is not an original idea. Indeed, it would be natural to expect that a human in their eighth decade, one who has been writing stuff for seven of those decades, an educated chap who for many years earned a living from his writing, would be no stranger to keeping a diary. Yet somehow I've managed to get this far without keeping track of my thoughts any actions on a daily basis.
Of course, as a true writer, an old school writer, the thought "must write a diary" was not immediately followed by the act of putting pen to paper. No, my first impulse was to tell myself I needed to buy a diary to write in. Pretty sure I've seen A5-size diaries at Sainsbury's. So maybe the next step on this journey is drive there, grab a diary and an early lunch, and ponder my prostate cancer treatment options.
Given the stage I am at, technically known as Grade Group 3, Gleason 7 (4+3), organ-confined, the basic choice is between surgery to remove the prostate, or a combination of radiotherapy and hormone therapy to kill off the cancerous cells and the testosterone on which they feed.
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Daily Notes
Music: Medicine Show by Big Audio Dynamite
Nutrients: Did not find a suitable diary at Sainsbury's, but picked up a nice roasted chicken.
Meds and such: Daily Pills ✔ G&T Tonic ✔ Spermidine✔ CBD ✘ Banana ✔
Terminology: OED = Oxford English Dictionary, specifically complete version, which is 1000 pages long because it details the history off all English words. You can access the basics online, but the gory details are firewalled. Today I realized my annual subscription has lapsed. It's £100 per year for Brits, which is a bloody cheek because it's only $100 for Americans. That's currently about a 25% discount. I could maybe VPN my way to paying dollars, but not today.
On the edge of my home town: drone's eye view of Coventry's west side
Using drones to make movies and take pictures can be a lot of fun. It offers new ways in which to see our world, ways previously limited to birds and flying insects. I took up drone photography as a hobby last December (2025). I recorded this footage in January and added a bit of sound and text.
This clip gives a 360-degree view from about 30 meters above where we live, on the west side of the city of Coventry, in England. The neighbourhood we live in is known as Mount Nod because that is what it was called long before there were houses here. You can see it near the middle of this map from 1895.
Talk about mixed emotions
I am writing this in the waiting room of the nuclear medicine facility at UHCW (University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire). I am about to have a bone scan to see if the cancer in my prostate has spread beyond said organ. This procedure requires me to be out of the house for about six hours. Not normally a problem, but…
…two weeks ago, Chey’s slow cognitive decline accelerated and it has not yet rebounded. This means that, for the first time ever, I felt the need to have a professional carer present in our home while I was absent from it.
On the plus side, living in Coventry means that we have access to affordable, professional, compassionate care. And one of those professional compassionate carers is currently at the house in case Chey needs anything while I am gone.
Arranging this care is partly a dry run for when I have to go in for prostate cancer treatment which could, probably will, limit my abilities to look after Chey myself for a couple of weeks.
So that’s the first pair of mixed emotions. I’d rather not have prostate cancer and I’d rather Chey had her full cognitive and physical abilities restored, but in the absence of those things we are fortunate to have access to care and support that we need. (A big shout out to Carers Trust Heart of England for it’s excellent work supporting carers.)
Another set of mixed emotions involves our dearly departed Lola, a lovely feline companion for the last five years. Sadly, she became ill three months ago and it turned out to be inoperable stomach cancer, so we had to say goodbye. That was also two weeks ago.
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| Lola |
Thankfully, Lola left us with many wonderful memories and thousands of cat pics! However, at the risk of sounding overly dispassionate and pragmatic, her departure has also eased the care burden on me, enabling me to focus more on Chey, while also supporting my mum (who it must be said, is healthier than both of us and looking forward to her 97th birthday next month).
So there’s #Hope that Chey will improve and my prostate cancer can be treated without a gap in care for Chey. And there’s #Gratitude that we are in a position to access the treatment and care we need. We both have books still to write and places yet so go.
Yes, as cruel months go, February, 2026 has been quite the contender (wry literary reference for anyone who’s had to read T. S. Eliot). But at least we’ve witnessed the first arrest of an heir to the throne in over 350 years!
As time permits I will be writing up notes on Chey’s health and mine. In the meantime, offerings to the weather gods would be appreciated. Seeing a lot more sun and a lot less rain would help, preferably before April.
P.S. I already made a website to share Chey's underlying health issues, it's called She's No Okay, Yet.
My 2025 output, from jagged AI to video takes, with sides of cybercrime, infosec, medicine, and anti-misogyny
This short video was a fun part of my AI-cybersecurity work in 2025
As one year ends and another begins I find it helpful to look back at what I managed to accomplish over the last 12 months, even as I plan for the next 12. Back when the study of cybersecurity was my full time job, this process was an annual ritual, often embodied in weighty reports that sought to capture the implications of one year's cybercrimes for the next year's defensive strategies. ----- D R A F T -----
Around the middle of 2019, cybersecurity ceased to be my full-time job as I retired from my role as senior security researcher at ESET, one of the leading makers of security software. My intention at the time was to move to England to support my mother who was entering her nineties, write my next book, and put out content that might attract some conference speaking, teaching, and consulting work.
Unfortunately, I had not factored in the changes to British society caused by the government's official policy of hostility to foreigners, including my American wife. She was forced to undergo a long and deeply distressing visa process before she could even enter the country, and suffered a serious brain haemorrhage before that permission was granted. That turn of events resulted in my transition to primary carer/caregiver for two people, my nonagenarian mum and my brain-damaged wife.
What does all that have to do with my 2025 output? Well, as you can see from the following snippets, my attention has been split in several directions. There's cybercrime of course, particularly the tension between institutions urging people to "just go online" and the grim reality that having any kind of online presence these days increases your chances of being scammed, defrauded, stalked, or otherwise assaulted and abused. I posted some of my work on this to Substack, a platform that I started to favour in 2025.
This was a great opportunity to be remunerated for digging deep into several areas of great interest and concern, areas in which I have a lot of history. (I was fortunate to have spent my last eight years of regular employment working with cybersecurity experts who had pioneered the use of machine learning, neural networks, and artificial intelligence — and I mean real experts, not techbros seduced by AI hype).
That was timely because my partner and I had just discovered that unknown number of the two dozen books that we have authored since 1992 were among the pirated volumes that the company known as Anthropic downloaded and used without permission. Thankfully, several authors sued Anthropic in a case that is referred to as Bartz v. Anthropic. The Authors Guild says the class action suit was "brought by authors against an AI company for using books without permission to train large language models." Naturally, we wrote about this and listed which of our books might be involved.
In June, I realised that 2025 would see the 30th anniversary of the first macro virus and so I started writing an article about this. For those not steeped in the history of malicious code, the appearance of a macro virus "in the wild" was a big deal. In fact, it made a difference to my life. I'd been working on the computer virus problem since the late 1980s, covering it in my 1992 book on computer security. By the start of 1995 I was working for the National Computer Security Association which established the first commercial testing lab for antivirus or AV software. At that time several AV products were proving to be very effective when properly deployed and managed, to the point where I was thinking "problem solved, or at least solvable".
The Word macro virus vastly expanded the scope of the problem and introduced an information system attack strategy that is still used today, by criminals and state-aligned actors, like ransomware extortionists and spy agencies. My 30th anniversary article was written to highlight the fact that the macro virus was made possible by a selfish decision on the part of Microsoft, and that fact should be a red flag for the "add artificial intelligence to everything" economy. Here's a link to the article:
Ironically, while researching the macro virus article, I found a glaring example of how the use of AI can go wrong. Naturally, I wrote about this and published an article online:
My research into the workings of AI and its impact on society continued with a novel hypothesis: if AI is going to help humans get things right, which is what a lot of politicians and investors were saying in 2025, what does AI think we should be doing about cybercrime? And what weight will that thinking carry in the real world.
So, I set about conducting structured interviews with seven different AI models. The results were very interesting to say the least. This led to an article I published on Medium titled: "ChatGPT Says Cybercrime Is a Pervasive and Damaging Global Threat, Other AI Agree."
Speaking of health, I was prompted to revisit the topic of haemochromatosis in September as a by-product of dealing with Chey's declining health. Now that Chey is a UK citizen we spent quite a bit of time working through the process of getting her some support as a housebound patient with cognitive issues, plus some help for me as primary carer/caregiver for said patient. I might share more of that journey in 2025, but here's the haemochromatosis article, a good basic introduction to the topic:
In October, I also refreshed my page on Primary Aldosteronism, also knowns as Conns, a leading cause of heart disease that is curable for many these days, given the advances in medical technology this century. The fact that millions of people who have this condition are not diagnosed or treated forms the basis for an article I hope to complete in Q1 of 2026. It addresses the reality of "AI medical breakthroughs" and why we should not count on these making a big difference to human health.
Finally, in November, I turned my attention to something of which we will see a lot more in 2026: misogyny and other ugly manifestations of male supremacy. I am sick of this, and the men who perpetuate it. Knowing how best to oppose this is challenging but awareness of the problem is clearly a first step. And clearly there are a lot of straight white cisgender men who don't yet see just how different, and difficult, life is for people who are not. To help open some eyes and minds I wrote: Lifting awareness of male supremacy: an elevator pitch with a twist.
So, those are the highlights of my output in 2025, but somehow it feels like I'm missing something. Ah yes, my annual look at the IC3 Internet Crime Loss statistics. This came out in April, and this year's title was: 2024 sets a record for cybercrime losses and at $16.6 billion it's a lot higher than I predicted. I am predicting a new record of $20 billion in the report that should arrive in April, 2026, a fivefold increase in five years, further evidence that too many humans are missing the point when it comes to cybercrime.
Speaking of missing, I did miss several events in 2025 due to my responsibilities as a carer. One of these was DefCon, the annual hacking conference, which I first attended 30 years ago. As you can see, I have the t-shirt to prove it, and yes, I did write about that.
Here's hoping you find some of my 2025 output to be at least one of these:
helpful, informative, entertaining
helpful, informative, entertaining
A great band you may not NO
Just over a decade ago I encountered a cool band out of Echo Park, Los Angeles, that went by the name of NO. I thought they had a very distinctive sound and their songs had lyrics that stuck with me. Give this track a listen and see if you agree: Leave the door wide open
The way I met NO was also cool: the band's lead singer, Bradley Hanan Carter, is the cousin of Andi Lee, who was my CEO at the time, but also an accomplished musician in his own right. He arranged for NO to play at several company events, including an awesome rooftop party during the annual BlackHat/DEFCON cybersecurity fest in Las Vegas. (Tickets to the event were very successfully employed as prizes to draw people to the company booth!)
My company phone produced some funky images of the band, 50 floors above Vegas. In fact, I took the shot above as NO were performing one of their most popular songs, "There's a glow". The opening of the song is:
There's a glow up over the city the city.
There's a glow up over us all.
The song was later set to video game footage from Grand Theft Auto. Note in 2014, the band changed their name to Black English, but 10 years later changed it back to NO. This makes their material tricky to find, but well worth it. And you can also reach them via a Facebook page.
That rooftop gig was not my first time seeing the band live. NO played a company party in 2012 where it was obvious that they were something special. They can create a very rich sound without it becoming noise, generating powerful emotional tension by restraining that big sound until just the right moment.
Here's a good sample of NO playing live along with an interview.
Disclaimer: I realize musical recommendations from old white guy may not be compelling to everyone, but this is an old white guy who loves good music, who once endured three days outdoors in cold English rain to catch artists like Santana, Led Zeppelin, Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, Jefferson Airplane, and Fairport Convention, in a single weekend (Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music, 1970).
Disclaimer: I realize musical recommendations from old white guy may not be compelling to everyone, but this is an old white guy who loves good music, who once endured three days outdoors in cold English rain to catch artists like Santana, Led Zeppelin, Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, Jefferson Airplane, and Fairport Convention, in a single weekend (Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music, 1970).
Lifting awareness of male supremacy: an elevator pitch with a twist
The source of much of what is wrong in the world today is male supremacy, awareness of which needs raising. Could one simple question do the trick?
I believe there are many men out there who, like me, are sick to death of guys who perpetuate, knowingly or unintentionally, the evil that is male supremacy and all the pain and suffering that it is causing in the world today.
In my opinion the solution to male supremacism is — or at least begins with — men and women improving their understanding of each other. One huge gap in mutual understanding that I see is the risk gap: far too few men truly comprehend the amount of risk that women have to deal with each and every day, throughout their lives.
According to a vast range of studies and statistics, life is a lot riskier for women than it is for men, even in so-called advanced countries like the US and UK. If you doubt this, consider this observation from a woman I know:
What a luxury it is not to have to think about being assaulted while you go about your day, to feel safe in a rideshare, loiter in a park, relax in a bar, walk home alone from work at night. — Soraya Chemaly
If you are still not convinced that women are forced to live with more risks than men, I have a question for you:
A man and a woman get into an elevator. Which one is doing risk assessment?
If you’re a man and your first thought was the woman, good for you! It sounds like you may have what it takes to truly understand what I mean about life being riskier for women. If you're a man and answered the woman and immediately felt discomfort, sadness, shame, or anger that even now, in 2025, this is how things: Congratulations! You have real potential to make this world a better place, a place where women feel as safe as men.
I'm talking about a place where women can enjoy the luxury of not having to think about being assaulted while they go about their day. A place where male supremacy is not exacting a constant toll on our mothers, sisters, daughters, partners, wives or lovers. A place in which it is no longer the case that:
...men’s relative freedom of movement and safety are unspoken privileges. And we pay for them dearly every day. — Soraya Chemaly
To be clear, I think men can and should make this world a place where women are free to live the lives they choose for themselves, and it safe for them to do so. As I've said, it’s going to take a lot of hard work, but I truly believe this work will make life a whole lot better for both men and women.
And there is one relatively easy piece of work we can all do right now: ask the elevator question (or the lift question if you’re in the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa).
Working the Elevator/Lift Question
I’ve been asking the elevator question for many years in many different settings and I find it's an effective and relatively non-confrontational way of raising awareness of how different life is for men and women due to the huge gap in their risk exposures. And to say that I’ve learned a lot by asking this question would be huge understatement.
First of all, almost all women answer the woman. I had expected this when I first came up with the question, but I wasn't prepared for how many women said it right way, I mean instantly, sometimes loudly and with feeling.
And I had not expected at all was the unprompted outpouring of elevator risk management strategies, some of which I will paraphrase here:
- I always head to the back of the elevator.
- If the elevator’s empty and the man goes first, I pretend I’ve forgotten something and don’t get in.
- If the elevator’s empty, like it’s just him and me, I just don’t get in.
- If it’s just me and and a man waiting for the elevator I take the stairs.
- I always take the stairs, and not because I need the exercise.
- If I’m the only woman waiting for an elevator I make sure my keys are in my hand.
For me, these strategies shine a bright light on the huge gulf between the way men and women experience daily life; and the fact that women are doing this is a concrete evidence of the insidious nature of male supremacy.
This risk gap, and the way that it reflects all the things that make up male supremacy today — the persistent misogyny, the enduring patriarchal structure of society and its institutions, the appalling level of violence against women — needs to be openly discussed by all of us. And I mean all of us everywhere, at dinner parties, in staff meetings, over drinks after work, and in our homes.
Which brings me to the elevator pitch, sometimes called the elevator speech, lift speech, or elevator statement. Wikipedia defines elevator pitch as: "a short description of an idea, product, or company that explains the concept in a way such that any listener can understand it in a short period of time."
I've written a ton of these during my time as an entrepreneur, author, and film producer. Here's my elevator pitch explaining why we should be asking the elevator question:
"If you're looking for a way to raise awareness of how unequal life still is for people who are not rich white men, especially for the more than 50% of people who present as female or feminine, pose the following question whenever you get a chance: A man and a woman get into an elevator. Which one is doing risk assessment?"
If the elevator ride is a longer one, I would add suggestions as to who should hear this question: your partner, your friends, your work colleagues, the people you meet at conferences, sports events, coffee shops and bars.
Anyway, that's my pitch for starting conversations about male supremecacy. Ask the elevator question and see what happens. I'd love to hear how you get on. Could it be said better? Do some people just not get it? Would it be better to say risk management that risk assessment?
(I tend to think of risk management as what's happening once inside the elevator car; but clenching of keys and taking the stairs are risk mitigation techniques — let's face it women are often very good at all of these things.)
Speaking of being very good at things, I think Sora Chemaly's new book — All We Want Is Everything: How We Dismantle Male Supremacy — is very good at spelling out what male supremacy is, why it still exists, what great harm it is causing, and how important it is for us to — in her words — dismantle it. Cramming all that into one clear and concise volume is a major accomplishment, one that I hope will spark major progress in the dismantling of male supremacy.
p.s. If you already know this stuff, recommend Soraya's book to folks who don't. Better yet, buy them a copy.
NOTES
1. Gender language: I made a conscious decision to write this article using the traditional terms men and women. My reason: I didn't want to lose any male readers before I had even made my point. That point is: male supremacy is bad for everyone and one way to advance the very urgent and very necessary task of dismantling it, is to raise awareness of just how much harm it does to us all, including cisgender women, trans and non-binary people, and those with Indigenous gender/social roles, and also cisgender men like me. I'm pretty sure most people in all those groupings already understand this, with the notable exception of an unacceptably high percentage of cisgender men.
2. Male Supremacy: The belief in cisgender men’s superiority and right to dominate, control, or erase “others,” women, trans and non-binary people, and those with Indigenous gender/social roles. —Institute for Research on Male Supremacism
3. Quotes: The exact source of Soraya's quotes in the article is All We Want Is Everything: How We Dismantle Male Supremacy, Kindle Edition, p 12, 2025.
4. Transparency: I should mention that I did not come up with the elevator question in the context of dismantling male supremacy. It a rose from my efforts to recruit more women into the cyber security profession. There has always been a shortage of people with the necessary aptitude and inclination to do the vital work of defending our ever-growing digital information systems and the data they process. I'm sure I wasn't the first person to point out that the profession was male dominated but that women were entirely capable of making vital contributions to profession. But I was one of the first to point out that, on aggregate, women tended to have a greater awareness of risk than men, and hence likelier to possess an aptitude for security work.
5. Keys and self-defense: Clenching your keys in your fist with the points sticking out between your fingers has long been a staple of "self-defense for women" but many experts are now of the opinion that a different style of key grip is better, as enthusiastically demonstrated by a man in this blunt-but-on-point YouTube video on using keys as an improvised weapon, and discussed by a woman here.
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