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Some of the software you use may be getting a security upgrade - thanks to the US Department of Defense (DoD).

The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023 requires that the DoD only pay for software free from "all known vulnerabilities or defects affecting the security of the end product or service."

By December 2025, BT (Openreach) aims to completely retire the UK’s decades-old copper telephony lines. The copper infrastructure is the basis for the UK’s Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) and Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), meaning that both of these traditional solutions will cease to be available in a few years.

As a year of unprecedented upheaval draws to a close, everyone is entitled to feel a little optimism that vaccines might make the world a safer, more normal place again in 2021. 

However, in the world of cybersecurity, merely hoping for safety is of course not enough and businesses around the world will now have to turn their attentions to combatting 2021’s cyber threats.

Keeping up with cybercriminals, from a cybersecurity perspective, is a tough job. Fighting cybercrime has been likened to a line in Through the Looking Glass where Alice says she must ‘run as fast as she can to stay in one place.’ When it comes to cybersecurity, you have to run ten times faster than those committing the crimes in order to get ahead of them. 

Home Secretary Amber Rudd has called for the government and security organisations to have access to messaging services such as WhatsApp, raising the question of whether such agencies should be allowed to investigate such encrypted services.

Your monthly round-up of all that's wonderful in the world of technology, science and, y’know, weird. Plus the occasional useful thing thrown in too.

Editors note: Some links have been updated since this was originally published.