Another day, another government report. Adorning my desktop right at this moment is the UK's National Cyber Security Strategy document, launched at the beginning of November 2016 by the Chancellor and Under-Treasurer of Her Majesty's Exchequer, Philip Hammond. It's grabbed my interest for a number of reasons.

First of these is the budget. £1.9bn has apparently been earmarked, though the history of government IT spending should tell us to expect it to cost a lot more. (£1.9bn is also, by an amazing coincidence, the same amount that Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs reckons is being lost in dodged tax by the mega-wealthy.) Lest we forget, the deluxe NHS healthcare records system, commissioned by the UK government at an estimated cost of £2.3bn, was canceled after nine years of work at an eventual cost of £12bn. This was the costliest IT cock-up in history, but the current revamp of the welfare system will overtake it soon unless it's canceled, as the welfare revamp has already cost £12.8bn – for a system that will have only 25,000 users.

The second is the glossary. This wonderful section is a thing of beauty, including no fewer than 28 variations on the word "Cyber." For example, it defines a cyber-physical system as one with "integrated computational and physical components." That sounds like my car to me, and my watch, and my computer, and my phone, and all those webcams that have been turned into a giant bot – in fact it sounds like anything made after 2012 that uses electricity. Any definition as broad as that is functionally useless.

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