Last Friday the internet was rocked with the discovery of an exploit in xz-utils that was not only well-put-together technically, but also an example of extremely effective long game social engineering. I could share my opinions, but the takes I’ve seen have actually been fairly nuanced and thoughtful, if (justifiably!) pessimistic, from people with more experience and more familiarity than I have.

So instead I made this.

I wasn’t up to performing this one, but this is still in the series I started many years ago of “computer security exploit song parodies”.

(Go to belkadan.com)

I know Meltdown and Spectre are old news by now, but here’s yet another analogy to explain how the “speculative execution” optimization leaks supposedly secure information. It involves Harry Potter.

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Hey, it’s been almost a year since we’ve had a computer security issue bad enough that I have to sing a song about it! This time around the bug only affects “computer people” who use “ssh”, “scp”, or “private keys”. But for those of us who do…oh gosh.

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