UPDATE, JANUARY 2023: The problems you can encounter with a private prescription for medicinal cannabis in the UK are described in a new article, Cannabis medicine UK: an update for 2023, with caveats. …. Cannabis-based medicines have been improving the health and quality of life of millions of people in…

Within four days of receiving her prescribed cannabis-based medicine, a women in her late sixties reported feeling “like a different person,” and in a good way. …

The general public’s awareness of problems with AI grew in 2020, yet 46% of US adults are still not aware of those problems. …

20 May 2020 — A recent Google survey suggests less than one in 10 adults in the US and UK trust tech firms to protect their personal information. According to the survey’s author, UK-based independent researcher Stephen Cobb: “This could be a big problem for current efforts to recruit technology…

Cannabis has been legally available on prescription in the UK since 2018 but—and you might find this quite shocking—the vast majority of people who use cannabis for medicinal purposes in the UK today still acquire it illicitly, in other words, illegally (see YouGov poll cited here). This is despite the…

In 2017, I wrote: “the digital technologies that enable much of what we think of as modern life have introduced new risks into the world and amplified some old ones. Attitudes towards risks arising from our use of both digital and non-digital technologies vary considerably, creating challenges for people who…

Recently, when he was asked about Russian interference in America’s elections, the Secretary of State of the United States said: “if it’s their intention to interfere, they’re going to find ways to do that.” (Fox News interview, Bogota, Colombia, February 26, 2018). That sounded very defeatist to some people, like…

Should the US and Russia hold talks on cybersecurity? In July of 2017, a lot of Americans shouted “No!” when US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said that the two countries were contemplating working together “to better understand how to deal with these cyber threats.” I can understand why people…

In 2017 the world experienced two very costly outbreaks of malicious code or malware: WannaCry and NotPetya. Collectively, they caused IT mayhem for thousands of organizations, imposing well over a billion US dollars in “respond and repair” costs (the impact of NotPetya on just three companies alone — Fedex, Maersk…