Today’s Tech Brief 29 October 2025 covers defending what we built, protecting what remains, and counting the cost of what’s coming next. Wikipedia turns 25 as one of the last genuine commons online. Britain’s Turing Institute pivots to infrastructure defence. And ordinary people are finally noticing the datacentres.
Missed yesterday’s roundup? Catch up on yesterday’s Tech Brief before we dive in.
Today’s Tech Roundup
Wikipedia at 25: Jimmy Wales and the Last Digital Commons
Twenty-five years is how long Wikipedia has survived without a single paywall, premium tier, or pivot to whatever venture capitalists were pushing that quarter. The Guardian profiles founder Jimmy Wales as potentially “the last decent tech baron,” which feels both generous and depressing. Generous because Wikipedia genuinely survived without paywalls, premium tiers, or pivoting to whatever venture capitalists were pushing. Depressing because maintaining a non-profit knowledge commons for a quarter-century apparently makes you an outlier.
The platform now faces threats from Elon Musk’s “Wokipedia” criticism and AI companies scraping its entire corpus to train language models without consent. But here’s what matters: Wikipedia worked because it was useful in a way that transcended ideology. When you needed the pinout for a DIN connector or the release date of Workbench 1.3, it was there, reliably, for free. That utility, combined with genuine community investment, created resilience that most dot-com era projects never achieved.
Alan Turing Institute Pivots to National Cybersecurity Defence
Britain’s leading AI institute is changing course; it is pivoting from artificial intelligence research to something more urgent: protecting the National Grid, transport networks, and water systems from the kind of cyber-attacks that can shut down entire cities. The shift follows the resignation of CEO Jean Innes and mounting government pressure to make the institute relevant to actual threats rather than theoretical ones.
There’s poetry in the naming. Anyone who’s studied Bletchley Park knows Turing broke Enigma by understanding how systems fail under pressure. Now his namesake institute defends against exactly that kind of systematic failure, just with ransomware instead of rotors.
The technical challenge is enormous. Much of the UK’s critical infrastructure runs on systems never designed for internet connectivity. SCADA controllers from the 1990s, industrial control systems with security models that assume physical isolation. Except they’re not isolated anymore, because someone decided remote monitoring would be convenient. You take a system designed for a controlled environment, then you bolt on connectivity as an afterthought. Scale that up to the National Grid and you see the problem.
UK Citizens Raise Environmental Concerns Over Datacentre Expansion
A poll of 1,000 UK citizens reveals deep public concern about energy and water consumption from the nation’s expanding datacentre infrastructure as Britain becomes a target for massive AI and cloud investments. The cloud isn’t ethereal; it’s concrete buildings in actual towns, drawing megawatts of power and millions of litres per day (think Olympic swimming pools, plural) for cooling. A BBC Micro drew about 30 watts; you could run one off a car battery for hours. Modern datacentres measure power consumption in megawatts. And for what? So ChatGPT can write marketing copy that requires human fact-checking anyway? There’s an efficiency paradox here. We have exponentially more computing power than we did in 1982, but we’re using it exponentially less thoughtfully. The constraints that forced elegant design, that made every byte and every watt matter, those constraints are gone. The question of what we’re actually getting for this environmental expenditure seems worth asking, especially when the answer increasingly seems to be speculative AI training runs for the next hype cycle.
LockBit 5.0 Expands Ransomware Operations
The notorious LockBit ransomware-as-a-service operation has returned with upgraded capabilities and wider targeting.
As mentioned above with the Turing Institute’s new mission, the threats are real and escalating. LockBit represents the professionalisation of cybercrime: affiliate programmes, customer support desks, SaaS business models. The technical sophistication is impressive in a horrifying way.
The hacker underground went from trading Amiga demos at copy parties to nine-figure extortion. Same technical skills, wildly different ethics. There was a time when “hacker” meant staying up until 3am to crack a copy protection scheme just to prove you could, then sharing the result for bragging rights and maybe a few copied floppies. LockBit is organised crime with a tech stack, and the only thing being shared is ransom demands.
LockBit’s evolution reflects how sophisticated cybercrime has become: operating across borders, targeting any sector, contributing to the steady rise in attacks that prompted responses like the Turing Institute’s infrastructure defence mission.
From the Wayback Machine
On This Day: 1878 – Willgodt Odhner Patents the Pinwheel Arithmometer
On 29 October 1878, Swedish engineer Willgodt Theophil Odhner was granted US Patent No. 209416 for his arithmometer, a compact mechanical calculator using pinwheel technology. The mechanism was beautifully simple: rotating discs with retractable pins, the number of exposed pins determining each digit’s value. Turn the crank, the pins engage with gears, the result appears in the register. You could see how it worked. No black boxes, no proprietary firmware. Just precision engineering doing mathematics. The first production run was 14 machines, built in St. Petersburg with funding from Ludvig Nobel. By the early 20th century, thousands were in use across Europe. Odhner’s design prioritised simplicity, reliability, and user-serviceability. You could repair one with basic tools. Try that with a modern smartphone.
What This Means
Today’s Tech Brief 29 October 2025 highlights a tension between what we’re defending and what we’re building. Wikipedia survived because enough people decided it was worth protecting. The UK’s critical infrastructure needs defending because we built it without thinking about security, then connected it anyway. Datacentres proliferate because someone decided AI was worth the environmental cost, and we’re only now asking if they were right. These aren’t separate stories; they’re all about what we choose to build and what we choose to protect.
Stay curious. Back up your Wikipedia edits. And maybe ask what all those datacentres are actually doing.
Want yesterday’s stories? Read the previous Tech Brief here.
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