About¶

Purple Lantern is one woman with one Linux workstation and a cat. On paper the company also has a majority shareholder, a .eu name, seven websites and a bank account, but the typing is done by the woman.

The workstation¶

Everything the company needs to keep going lives on one encrypted disk: SSH keys, full clones of the repositories, the build tools for the blog and the front door, the password vault, the DNS records, the recovery codes and the mail archive. The disk is backed up at home and again somewhere else. When a provider closes an account, what can still be done is whatever that disk allows, and the answer was worked out before it was needed. A forge that vanishes takes nothing the clones do not already hold, and a host that closes leaves the built sites sitting in Git. What the disk cannot do is get back into an account that recovers through a mailbox which in turn recovers through somebody else, which is why the recovery codes went into the vault instead.

The method¶

The work sits where systems, people and pressure meet. The technical problem is rarely the hard part. What people do once something has gone wrong is harder, because communication breaks down under pressure and fear shuts curiosity off at the moment it is needed most. A group under stress behaves much the same whether it is a family or a utility, and people learn what they own and are curious about, while a procedure handed to them stays a procedure. So the situation is made concrete enough to play, an objective is set, and the facilitator steps back to see what the attacker can do, what the defender can see, where a decision changes the route, and what people do when the pressure is real.

The shareholder¶

Since 27 November 2025 the majority shareholder and chief theorist has been Ponder Stibbons, appointed by Lord Vetinari on several understandings, one being that minutes are kept. Mister Stibbons holds the paper and none of the keys. He has no password on any account, no SSH key on any remote and no recovery code in the vault, and he is nobody’s recovery address, so on the authentication drawing not a single arrow passes through him. The minutes are kept in Markdown, in the repository, where a shareholder can read them without a login.

Elsewhere¶

Cats, Terry Pratchett and a wetland to walk in.

Magrat Garlick keeps the minutes of the coven. Nobody has read them, and the coven has run on them for years.