Category
A right of access under data protection law allowing anyone to ask an organisation what personal data it holds about them, and to receive a copy — and the scope is wider than most organisations
Who decides what happens to the data. The controller determines the purposes and means of processing; the processor acts on the controller's instructions. The distinction sets who carries which legal
4G and 5G are mobile network generations. Wi-Fi calling is a feature letting your phone route calls over an internet connection instead of the mobile network. 4G (LTE). The generation that made
A checksum or hash is a fixed-length string calculated from a file's contents. Recalculating it after downloading and comparing against a published value confirms the file is exactly what was
Digital rights management is technology restricting how digital content can be used, copied and accessed. Its existence is why "buying" digital content frequently does not mean what the button says.
All three run software in an isolated environment, and they differ in how much they recreate — which determines their performance and what they can run. An emulator simulates different hardware in
A spreadsheet is a grid of cells you manipulate directly. A database is a structured store with enforced rules, designed for many users, large volumes and guaranteed consistency. Where a spreadsheet
A server is a computer that provides services to other computers. Hosting is renting space on one so your website or application is available to others. What makes a server a server. Not special
Because a file is only meaningful to software that understands its format, and both the software and the medium it sits on decay — on timescales far shorter than people assume. The three separate
The internet is the global network of connected computers. The web is one service that runs on it. The web is part of the internet; the internet is far more than the web. The internet is
An algorithm is a finite sequence of unambiguous steps for solving a problem or completing a task. That is the entire definition, and it is considerably more mundane than popular usage implies. What
A browser is a program on your device that displays web pages. A search engine is a website you visit to find other websites. They are different categories of thing, and the confusion is
A QR code is simply an encoded string — most often a URL — and the risk is that you cannot read it before you act on it. That single property is what makes the format attractive to fraudsters. The
A supply chain attack compromises an organisation indirectly, by attacking something it trusts and installs — a software vendor, a library, an update mechanism or a service provider. Rather than
Potentially everything you do in your browser — which makes extensions one of the most under-appreciated security risks on a personal computer. What a permissive extension can access: The content of
CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It is a challenge designed to be easy for people and difficult for software. Why they are getting harder
For a mixture of genuine functional need, defensive over-requesting, and data collection — and the three are difficult to distinguish from the request alone. Legitimate reasons: The feature requires
They are nested categories, not alternatives — each sits inside the one before. Artificial intelligence is the broadest: any system performing tasks that would normally require human intelligence. It
A large language model (LLM) is a statistical model trained to predict likely continuations of text. A search engine retrieves documents that exist. They answer questions in fundamentally different
Metadata is data about the file rather than its visible content. Almost every file carries some, and it frequently reveals considerably more than people intend to share. Photographs — EXIF data: GPS
A file format is the actual structure of the data inside the file. A file extension is the few characters after the dot in the filename — a label, and nothing more. The crucial point is that the
An operating system sits between your hardware and your applications, managing resources so that programs do not have to know about the specific machine they run on — and so that they cannot
A DDoS — distributed denial of service — attack overwhelms a service with traffic until it cannot serve legitimate users. The goal is not to steal data or break in; it is simply to make something
It refers to the width of the data a processor handles at once, and more importantly to how much memory it can address. The practical consequences are almost entirely about memory. The memory limit