Someone submitted my post about archiving my gem repositories to Hacker News, the house journal of venture capitalist Silicon Valley techbro orthodoxy, and it made it to the top of the page. Despite my trepidation, to my surprise the discussion (with over 500 comments) was mostly reasonable.

The presidential election result in Brazil was a relief. It’s good news for the Amazon rainforest, and thus for (almost) everyone and everything. It’s bad news for Zuckerberg, a man who always seems to be found on the opposite side of the battlefield from humanity.

Vučić being defeated in Serbia seems like good news, too. Is this a reverse for the far right international? It’s too early to count any chickens: there’s still Israel and the United States to come, and the quinquennial threat of a Le Pen presidency looms larger than ever.

The eMudhra incident, in which their catastrophically insecure private keys were revealed to be so weak that one of them was literally, no word of a lie, just the number four, was one of the funniest screw-ups of all time. Apparently they even used a proper air-gapped hardware module to generate the key, then spoiled it with a poorly-written script.

There were many amusing memes. My contribution:

It’s called two factor authentication because there are two factors and they’re both two.

It’s not great news, because these insecure roots are baked into all kinds of devices that might never get updated, but that’s the fundamental problem with the current model of trust roots: it’s only as secure as the weakest link, and if I take a look at a default installation of Firefox, that includes several governments whose approaches to democracy and privacy might not be as principled as I’d like.

The PHP vulnerability was widely reported across non-tech media. The BBC brought out their “cyber correspondent” who had only learned of the existence of PHP the day before. Remember Gell-Mann Amnesia next time you read the news!

The exploit wasn’t nothing, but it appears that it wasn’t nearly as easily exploitable as the coverage made it seem.

As I cycled home in the drizzle on Tuesday, my bicycle chain snapped. By good fortune I was on a quiet street at the time, not trying to get out ahead of an oncoming car.

After anointing myself in the holy oils (smearing filthy chain grease all over my hands), making a blood offering (I caught my knuckle with an opposing fingernail while using the chain tool) and sacrificing a link to the bicycle gods, my steed was restored to life and I continued home.

I’d put the chain tool in my repair kit when I was cycling across the country and back again, so I wouldn’t be stranded by a broken chain. In the end, I needed it a few miles from home.

I spent three evenings out at events last week.

The first was a Hallowe’en-themed Solve-Along-A-Murder-She-Wrote at the Prince Charles Cinema (now saved from the threat of eviction) on Thursday night.

We ate a very cheap and delicious meal at Govinda’s in Soho beforehand, and tried to spot the Palantir offices in Soho Square as we walked past on our way to the cinema. There are conflicting details online about which building it is – they seem to have migrated around the square over the years – but the deliberate lack of branding and anodyne “employee entrance” laminated A4 signs give it away by trying too hard to say “nothing to see here”.

On Saturday I listened to a candlelit performance of Baroque music from Purcell and other 17th century composers performed by Musica Antica. It was pouring with rain outside, and a room full of damp punters made for not ideal conditions for instruments with traditional gut strings.

I was helping on the bar. It’s not too onerous: very intense for two periods of about fifteen minutes, and relaxed the rest of the time. I joined some of the performers in the pub afterwards, where it occurred to me that unlike my foolish choice of software development, playing theorbo or viol is a relatively secure career. Who would have thought that a few years ago?

Finally, as part of the London Month of the Dead I saw Thomas Truax in the beautiful surroundings of King’s College Chapel on Sunday evening. He plays guitar and a variety of experimental instruments of his own design, accompanied by a mechanical drum machine built around a couple of bicycle wheels. It was entertaining and weird, exactly as I’d hoped.

Quite a few links this week: