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Fergus O'Sullivan

Freelance tech journalist based in Prague and Kyiv

Portfolio

Thank you for checking out my portfolio, I appreciate your interest.

Latest Articles

These are some of the best articles I've published recently.

Startup Kitchen •

“If you’re not in Ukraine, you’re not in defensetech”

That said, the flying variety was still the star of the show, with multiple companies showing off what they had come up with. These ranged from tiny drones used for reconnaissance, to ones loaded with explosives and used to hunt down enemy infantry or infiltrate bunkers and tanks. Drones’ effectiveness on the battlefield can’t be overestimated, and many of the startups I spoke to in Ukraine were focused on a specific aspect to increase it further. Some of this is simply building better drones: f...
Startup Kitchen •

Himera’s Rudominski: “You can’t come up with this stuff in a lab”

First, the tech: the idea to build handsets didn’t come out of nowhere. Rudominski and his now co-founders first had a startup that suffered from bad timing. “It was  a connectivity solution for digital nomads who need to connect to the internet from any country. It would remove the need for getting local SIM cards. Exactly when we were launching that, COVID hit and the entire business model didn’t really work anymore.”Still, when two years later Moscow launched its full-scale invasion, experien...
Startup Kitchen •

What’s brewing in Plzeň?

The organizations taking the lead in growing startups are the Plzeň Innovation Ecosystem (PINE), Business Innovation Centre (BIC), and SITMP, the city’s IT agency. In this article, we talk to several startups that are coming up under its umbrella; other articles in the series talk about its drone initiative Drony SIT, as well as an in-depth interview with its main initiator, Luděk Šantora. PINE is supported by the city and serves as a support that connects education, talent development, innovati...
Startup Kitchen •

Pavel Doležal: “ I don’t think about Czechia anymore“

Doležal’s love of the internet started early: he was an exchange student in Las Vegas in 1994, where he was allowed to play around with the nascent internet in his school’s library instead of attending Pascal classes. “ It was just text and a terminal and I fell in love.”On his return, Doležal shared his enthusiasm for this new-fangled network and in 1999 joined a small internet studio, which did well and grew into a minor regional player. He then started a small mobile internet company soon aft...
Startup Kitchen •

Luděk Šantora: Transformation from the inside

Through this initiative, the Centre of Robotics, the city’s center for robotics, was started. “We opened the courses for children at the Center of Robotics. We had teachers there, and they would then help teachers from our basic schools. The school teachers accepted this way of working.” The Centre of Robotics would turn out to be only the start. As kids “graduated,” it became clear there was plenty more for them to do and learn. Initiatives like BIC – the business incubation and acceleration ce...
Startup Kitchen •

Marek Miltner: “Stanford talent can in some ways be worse than Czech talent” 

The end result, after a few more adventures in startups, was that he realized he wanted something else for a change: “ I’ve enjoyed it, but at the end of the day. I clearly am very motivated by purpose, so why not focus a couple years of my peak productive life on being impact driven and not commerce driven. Because even at startups, many people from corporations tend to think like, ‘oh, in the startup you can do whatever.’ Miltner emphasizes, though that they can actually be even more cutthroat...
Startup Kitchen •

AI & Startups: Prague Crawl attendees share their views

Organized by Prague-based automation company Apify in conjunction with Massive, the one-day conference featured speakers from companies in the automation and web scraping space, as well as a panel discussion. As the industry is in the throes of the AI revolution, the topics all focused heavily on how it will affect web scraping, particularly with the advent of AI agents.Naturally, for us at Startup Kitchen, the question is how all this will affect startups. Will new companies suffer under all th...
Startup Kitchen •

Presto’s Vojta Rocek: “We never went woke”

Looking over his career, there’s no doubt about Roček’s fondness for hard numbers: “I’m a data analyst at heart. I love to work with data.” The data definitely seems to love him back: his first company, called Stories.bi and which analyzed business data, was sold to Workday, the HR platform. This gave Roček the means to buy into Presto Ventures’ second fund.Not that he only invests: for a time, Roček also owned a pub until something many service industry veterans know hit him. “I realized I don’...

VPNs & Cybersecurity

For most of my career I've covered consumertech, focusing on security software.

The Independent •

What is a VPN? Here’s how to choose the right one for you

Virtual private networks, better known as VPNs, aren’t new technology. The first VPN protocol – a set of rules that determines how programs ‘talk’ to each other – was developed in the late 1990s. Once a niche product for the privacy-conscious, VPNs are hard to ignore these days. They’re now everywhere, as many of us are spending more time working from home, and VPN companies have taken their marketing to streaming and TV. What is a VPN, though? And why would you need one? How do you determine wh...
How-To Geek •

Why You Need a Longer Password

We all know the annoyance of creating a new account online: you enter the password you want, and then the service bugs you about minimum length and using special characters. There’s a reason you’re being pushed to do this, though, and in this article I’ll go over why you need a long password.
The short answer is password entropy. That term sounds way more complicated than it really is unless you’re familiar with cryptography, so let’s take a look at what password entropy is. Password entr...
How-To Geek •

When Should You Use ZTNA Instead of a VPN?

Over the last few years or so, a new kind of network security system has emerged. Known by the acronym ZTNA, these powerful tools can replace VPNs. Should you use a ZTNA instead of a VPN?
The answer depends on a few factors. A virtual private network (VPN) is easier to set up and provides a strong, single line of defense. It's best for individuals and smaller businesses. A zero-trust networking access (ZTNA) application is more complicated to implement, but builds tiers of defenses that moni...
Proton •

What is encryption? | Proton

Encryption is a way to hide information so private data is kept that way. Without encryption, anybody could access your communications. In this article, we go over how it works and some of the different types of encryption there are.


The short explanation is that encryption is a way to scramble information so nobody except the people it’s meant for can access it. This scrambling is done by using mathematical algorithms that lock and unlock the information. There’s a lot more to it than that,...
How-To Geek •

How VPN Encryption Works

A virtual private network is a service that lets you connect to servers anywhere in the world, letting you pretend you're somewhere you're not and securing your connection in the process. How does VPN encryption work, though? Here's how it keeps your connection secure. To understand VPN encryption, we first need to go over VPN protocols. These are programs that govern how a VPN talks to other entities on the network, like servers or sites---it uses the term "protocol" in the same meaning as "...
How-To Geek •

How to Build Your Own VPN Using a VPS

If you're not sure you can trust commercial VPNs, one alternative is to set up a VPN for yourself using a virtual private server, or VPS. With some know-how, you could be up and running in just a few minutes and for just a couple bucks. Setting up your own VPN is cutting out the middleman in a way: there's no VPN service to pay, nor do you have to take on faith that they will destroy your logs---the records that show which sites you connected to and when. A DIY VPN is a guarantee that nobody...
Cloudwards •

BestVPN.com & Buffered VPN: A Match Made in Heaven

Cloudwards.net may earn a small commission from some purchases made through our site. However, any earnings do not affect how we review services. Learn more about our editorial integrity and research process.

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History Articles

I studied history, and I still have a passion for it. Thanks to The History Guild, I have found the occasional outlet for that passion.

History Guild •

The Siege of Malta through Australian eyes

Reading time: 12 minutesThe Siege of Malta in the Second World War, which lasted from June 1940 until November 1942, was a linchpin of the war. Had Malta fallen to the Axis, the war may have concluded very differently. Australian soldiers, sailors, and airmen played a crucial part in defending the island, in this article we explore how they experienced it.By Fergus O’SullivanLike many of our article about Australians in the Mediterranean in World War Two, this article draws heavily on the Austra...
History Guild •

Can Games Teach History?

Reading time: 7 minutesVideo games love historical settings: from adventure games like the Assassin’s Creed series, to action games like Call of Duty and its sequels, to strategic sagas like Europa Universalis; there’s no shortage of examples. Can computer games be more than entertainment, though, and can they actually teach their audience about what happened in the past?By Fergus O’SullivanThat can be pretty difficult to pin down, says Pieter Van den Heede, a lecturer at the Erasmus University...
History Guild •

Four Video Games That Actually Teach History

Reading time: 13 minutesThere are plenty of video games that use historical backdrops for their narrative, or even entice you to recreate history in some way. As we discuss with historian Pieter van den Heede in our article on whether games can teach history, the question remains of how much you actually learn while playing these games. Thankfully, some do a much better job than others, and in this article, I will explore four of them.By Fergus O’SullivanFor this article, I’m going to focus on t...
History Guild •

How a Cyprus Museum Uses Tech to Make the Past Come Alive

What do you do when a building important to your city’s history is inaccessible? When you can see it, but simply cannot get anywhere near it? This is the question facing the Ledra Palace Hotel in Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus and one of the last few divided cities in the world. One group of researchers seems to have found a solution, using cutting edge tech.By Fergus O’SullivanUp until the Turkish invasion in 1974, the Ledra Palace Hotel served as a social hub for the elite of Nicosia. It hoste...