This blog is retired (after 19 years)

As my first blog reaches nearly one million views, I've decided to place the old thing into retirement.

For the foreseeable future it will stay online as an archive, but I will not be updating it.

Since I started my security testing business SE Labs, there hasn't been time to blog privately, which you can see from the massive reduction in postings since 2017.

And I don't have time to update this blog, fix missing images and bring it up to modern design standards. So it's now on ice and if you want see what I'm up to, or to get in contact, the best place is through my personal website, SimonEdwards.com.

Highlights

I started this blog, HACK (by Simon PG Edwards), in April 2007 with a short post about a new magazine on Windows Vista. I had contributed the security chapters. It was my first blog post ever.

Over the years I discussed security testing; the launch of Dennis Technology Labs; and my 'bookazine', The Complete Internet Security Handbook.

I created a Facebook account in 2008 simply to understand the security implications. I contributed to Dennis Publishing's Facebook bookazine. I could never have predicted that Facebook would bypass its users' privacy settings to sell their data.

I wrote about strange devices being hacked; the possibility of planes and missiles suffering the effects of viruses; and examined Apple's macOS security - reposting an article I wrote for MacUser in 2002. Much of it is still relevant today.

In fact I now test macOS security regularly and find it is pretty easy to compromise - certainly no harder than Microsoft Windows. This heretical view has been entirely ignored by the current IT media, which I find confusing but also quite interesting.

Twitter

As a journalist I received advance notice of Twitter's existence, and actually managed to snag a user account in my own name, simonedwards! I saved it for years, waiting for a chance to use it. What a shame that it's clear I'll never want to.

GPS?!

The most surprising part of my blogging experience was that by far the most popular posts I made were not directly related to security.

I wrote about how to extract GPS coordinates from images and then plot them on Google Maps. In doing so I discovered a bug in Windows 7, which failed to show the polarity of the Longitude and Latitude values.

At the time of writing, the number of people who have viewed this article was larger than viewers of the next four most popular articles combined (over the lifetime of this blog).

Hacking power sockets

The fourth most popular post was about how to use European power plugs with UK power sockets without an adapter. You just need a little bit of plastic, like a pen lid.

Podcasting

I dropped back into the blog in 2021 with a few business tips, based on my experiences as an unexpected entrepreneur. I also wrote a little bit about the Cyber Security Decoded podcast I created for SE Labs. At the time of writing it is in Apple's top 10 for 'cyber security' podcasts.

I then wrote a silly article about how to use a stolen kitchen shelf as an essential podcasting tool, which has been enjoyed by thousands as of March 2026.

The end...

So this is the end of HACK, my blog. Thanks for reading it. It's been fun and educational for me. Please consider this archive as my notebook of things I've found to be interesting in tech over the last 19 years.

What now?

Visit SimonEdwards.com if you want my latest opinions, wish to invite me to speak or want to chat about security. There is also the SE Labs newsletter, which you might enjoy.