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It is probably a little hard for people who know me now to believe that I was once a really cute altar boy. By the age of six I was getting up early to ride my bike into the community of Lewisham in South London to serve at 7 AM Mass. I was always sober, the priest wasn’t: a situation not helped by the altar wine (which tastes like very bad sherry, by the way – don’t ask). Until the dog day happened. A dog chased my bike and I fell off. Ten stitches later, I was a dog hater.I got over my fear of dogs to the point that when an erstwhile Polish sister-in-law had an Alsatian that wanted to take some meat out of me, I terrorized him to the point of making him back through a cat flap in her kitchen door.But, cats? They have always been a delight. When I was teaching at college in the South-West of England I had a cat that loved to travel in the car with me. She knew exactly where she was and about five miles from home she would be on the passenger seat with her paws on the dashboard watching out ...

I first signed Part I of the Official Secrets Act in Britain when I was at the tender age of sixteen, working during the summer vacation in the Registry Office of the Inland Revenue (the equivalent of the IRS) in Somerset House, London. If there was a Part I, you could certainly deduce that there was a Part II. But I cannot tell you how many Parts there are because I have sworn not to.Even in 2012 - when the thirty year restriction expires and I will be legally able to speak and write more fully about my career, my involvement with government, and some of the shady sides of life - I will still be forbidden to talk about the Official Secrets Act. The penalties are, let us say, nasty, and I am quite sure those in power would seek me out: even in my little hidey hole in Canada.Most people do not realize how difficult it is for someone who has done any kind of work that cannot be publicly acknowledged. Do you leave gaps in your resumé, obliquely suggesting to potential employers that there might be jail ti...

In 1967 I was teaching at a college in the South-West of England. My undergraduates that year were a really mixed bunch of characters and we had, very unusually, two women moving forward to electronic engineering degrees in the group of maybe twenty students. The two ladies stood out because they were so much better at just about every level than their male colleagues. They presented material on time; they were logical; they worked honestly; they were accurate; they left labwork clean; they really cared about what they were doing and where they were going. They had to work harder just so that they could be recognized as being real. Totally unfair, of course, and, unfortunately, nothing much has changed in that respect over all those decades.That same year I was involved with some research work with high-power klystrons, which were invented by the Varian brothers in the late 1930s (the company has just been acquired by Agilent) and became the staple tube for early radar. I was invited to a conference on R...

The temptation to use electronic banking is really high. You sit at your computer and check your balances, tell the bank who to pay – and when – and where to move your funds around: if you are fortunate enough, these days, to actually have some excess cash to make such decisions necessary.But electronic and secure don’t, for me, fit well together in a sentence. Even electronic ATMs kind of scare me because they are made by the same folks that build fraud-capable voting machines!Finjan Software, which sounds like it should be of Nordic origin but is actually in the same building in San José where I had an office when working for Electronic Design Magazine, uncovered a real monster this summer in Germany. A Trojan going by the name URLZone (not one of EN-Genius’ ZONEs!) managed to lift from bank accounts €300 k (US$440 k) over a period of twenty-two days through September 1, 2009.This clever piece of malware is only executable on Windows systems and uses a hole that is availa...