The UU Power & Light training programme¶

Or: How Ponder’s Experience Became A Teaching Curriculum

Unseen University Power & Light is not so much a utility company as a long-running negotiation between physics, institutional memory, and several systems that were never meant to be networked.

From basements that insist they are still cellars, it powers the Patrician’s Palace, regulates the Bursar’s Automated Alchemical Reactor, and maintains environmental controls for the Library, where a failed temperature sensor could destabilise L-space itself. The infrastructure is a magnificent archaeological layer cake: decades of equipment added atop whatever came before, nothing ever removed, and absolutely everything assumed to be “safe enough”.

Then someone approved modernisation. Someone else added network connectivity. Nobody approved authentication.

This programme lets you step into that world and work through it the way real industrial security work actually happens: break it, fix it, explain it to people who control the budget.

The three parts can be taken independently.

• Welcome to the infrastructure keeping the Patrician’s city running. The coffee is hot, the alarms are probably ignorable, and absolutely nothing requires a password.

• Everything needed to transform UU Power & Light from “anyone can crash this” to “defended in depth, operationally viable, mostly secure.”

• Then comes the truly difficult part: sixty minutes convincing UU Power & Light’s leadership, and ultimately Lord Vetinari himself, that these vulnerabilities actually require fixing.

And together, they form a complete attack-to-decision pipeline.