How these explainers are written and kept accurate

Sources

Explainers are based on official and primary documents: guidance from government security and consumer agencies (CISA, NIST, the FTC and the FCC in the United States, and the National Cyber Security Centre in the United Kingdom), Internet standards published by the RFC Editor, and, for passkeys, the FIDO Alliance standards body. Vendor marketing, blogs, forums and product reviews are not used as the basis for any statement.

Each explainer lists the documents it relies on at the end of the page. Where the sources are silent or disagree, the explainer says so rather than filling the gap.

Security advice

Security advice can do harm if it overstates what a step achieves. These explainers therefore describe steps as reducing risk, not removing it, and do not promise that any setting, habit or product will keep an account or device safe. They do not give instructions for investigating or cleaning up a compromised work system; for that, follow your organisation's procedures or the guidance of the service involved.

Writing

• Plain language, with technical terms explained the first time they appear and collected in the glossary.
• Source material is paraphrased, not copied.
• Worked examples are invented to illustrate a point. They describe no real person, household or business, and they are labelled as examples.
• No statistics are used unless a cited source states them.

Evergreen, not news

This is not a news site and does not report on individual incidents, scams or product releases as they happen. It covers the lasting basics that change slowly. For current alerts, the agencies named on each explainer publish their own up-to-date guidance.

Links and products

In this first edition, cited documents are named but not linked, so that every page can be reviewed before any outbound link is added. Any links added later will go only to pages that help the reader. No products or services are recommended by brand, and there are no affiliate links. Paid or sponsored links, if there ever are any, will be labelled as such on the page and marked with the appropriate link attributes.

Updates and corrections

Explainers will be re-checked against their sources when those sources change. A correction that changes the meaning of an explainer will be noted at the end of that explainer with the date. There is no contact route yet, so corrections currently come from that periodic re-checking rather than from reader reports.

Use of AI

The explainers were drafted with an AI system from the cited documents. A line-by-line check against those documents and an independent human editorial review have not been done yet. The about page describes how the site was made.