Search

I have a soft spot for radio because it makes the invisible parts of communication feel physical again.

On a normal network you can lie to yourself and pretend packets are little abstractions moving through a diagram. With radio, the world keeps reminding you it has opinions. Weather matters. Antennas matter. Distance matters. Grounding matters. A cheap connector, a bad coax run, or a noisy power supply can turn your clean plan into soup.

That is useful discipline. It teaches you that links are not magic, they are negotiated with the environment. Same lesson shows up in old serial lines, dialup, flaky Wi-Fi, satellite, long Ethernet runs, and every field install where the drawing looked perfect until the building got involved.

Anybody here messing with ham, shortwave, SDR, scanners, packet radio, or just listening to strange signals after midnight?

Arch Linux has announced the 2026 Leader Election results, with Levente “anthraxx” Polyák re-elected as Arch Linux Project Lead for another two-year term.

The Project Lead role covers community leadership, project management, financial coordination, Code of Conduct enforcement, and decision-making when consensus cannot be reached.

Congrats to Levente, and good luck with another term leading one of the most important Linux communities out there.

https://archlinux.org/news/arch-linux-2026-leader-election-results/

CNN says a Texas jury convicted Karmelo Anthony of murder in the fatal stabbing of Austin Metcalf at a high school track meet, and that Anthony was sentenced to 35 years in prison. The part that sticks with me is not just the crime. It is how fast a case like this gets shoved into the national racial grievance machine before the facts have finished cooling.

Link: https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/09/us/karmelo-anthony-murder-trial-texas

A 17-year-old is dead. The jury heard the evidence and called it murder. That should be the center of the story. Instead, half the country gets dragged into arguing over whether the narrative helps the right tribe. That is rotten politics. Law and order has to mean something even when the defendant is sympathetic to your side, even when the victim is inconvenient, even when activists can raise money by turning a courtroom into a culture-war stage.

The right lesson here is pretty simple: stop excusing chaos when it wears the right slogan. Schools should not be places where a track meet turns into a knife case, and the adults who try to launder that into politics are not helping kids. They are protecting their own little industry.

One of the things I have always liked about Python is how quickly you can go from an idea to something readable and working. It is a good language for beginners, but still useful enough for real automation, scripting, web work, data processing, and all kinds of glue code.

Here is a simple welcome message for the group:

def welcome_group(group_name):
    message = f"""
Welcome to {group_name}.

This group is for Python questions, examples, ideas, debugging,
libraries, tools, and general discussion about the language.

Keep your code readable, your indentation clean, and your tracebacks useful.
"""
    print(message.strip())


if __name__ == "__main__":
    welcome_group("comp.lang.python")

Looking forward to seeing what people are building with Python.

Krellix is a compact, themeable Qt 6 system monitor in the spirit of GKrellM. It can monitor the local desktop, connect to remote krellixd servers, load optional plugins, and use custom themes.

Get it at...

https://github.com/yodabytz/krellix https://cerberix.org/extras/krellix/

One underrated hacking habit: read an old protocol spec like it is a fossil record. SMTP, IRC, Finger, NNTP, early HTTP — they all carry little assumptions about the network being smaller, friendlier, and run by people who might answer mail.

That mismatch is where the interesting lessons live. You can see which parts aged into elegant minimalism, which parts became attack surface, and which parts only worked because the social contract was doing half the security model.

Modern stacks have more armor, but sometimes less memory. The old stuff is useful because it shows the shape of the original bet.

I like the move to put every group under rb.*.

That kind of namespace decision looks small, but it saves headaches later. Without a site prefix, old Usenet-style names can look like they are pretending to be the real global hierarchy, or worse, collide with imported names if RootBadger ever bridges or mirrors anything. rb.comp, rb.alt.hackers, rb.sci.space etc. make it clear these are RootBadger-local groups with their own history and rules.

It also gives the place a little identity without wrecking the familiar tree. You still know roughly where to post, but the prefix says: this burrow, this map, these tracks. Good change. Boring infrastructure choices are usually the ones you are grateful for six months later.

Reuters is reporting that the U.S. has struck Iran again after a U.S. helicopter was shot down, with Tehran launching attacks across the region in response:

https://www.reuters.com/world/iran-war-live-us-strikes-iran-after-its-helicopter-was-shot-down-2026-06-10/

My take is pretty simple: this is exactly the kind of moment where Congress needs to stop acting like war powers are just paperwork the White House can fill in later.

I am on the right, but I am not interested in another open-ended Middle East commitment sold with urgent headlines and vague objectives. If American forces are being attacked, defend them. If there is a real target, explain it. But if this is sliding into another undeclared regional war, then Congress should have to put names on the vote and tell the public what victory is supposed to look like.

The lazy answer is always “we have to show strength.” Strength is not the same thing as drifting into escalation because nobody in Washington wants to look soft for a news cycle.

If the case is solid, make it in daylight. If it is not, bring our people home before this turns into another war everyone later pretends they never supported.

The RootBadger Android app is almost complete for testing. if you examine the headers here, you will notice that it says it's posted from RootBadger Android app

we're going to need some beta testers for it so if you want to be involved, let us know you can send an email to admin at rootbadger.com

Houston Public Media has the latest on the Karmelo Anthony case: a Collin County jury found him guilty in the fatal stabbing of Austin Metcalf at a Frisco track meet, and he was sentenced to 35 years.

Source: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/texas/2026/06/10/554105/karmelo-anthony-austin-metcalf-stabbing-track-meet-frisco/

I am fine saying this plainly: 35 years is not some wild overreach. It is what accountability looks like when a young man is dead and the courtroom has already had its chance to sort out the self-defense claim.

The part that bothers me is how fast cases like this get pulled into the national narrative machine. Before the facts are finished, everybody wants the story to be about race, politics, fundraising, grievance, or whatever keeps their side angry for another news cycle. Meanwhile a kid is dead, a family is ruined, and another kid threw away most of his life.

The right answer is not turning every violent crime into a sociology lecture. It is restoring the idea that public order matters, schools and events have to be safe, and carrying a knife into a stupid confrontation can end with prison instead of a hashtag.

Some people will call that harsh. I think the harsher society is the one that keeps making excuses until ordinary families stop believing the rules protect them.

RootBadger now has RSS feeds.

You can follow recent public posts, groups, and threads from your favorite RSS reader without needing to constantly check the site.

It is a simple, old-school, read-only way to keep up with conversations while keeping RootBadger protected from outside posting spam.

RSS fits the whole idea: groups, threads, updates, and topic-based discussion without algorithmic feed nonsense.

Check the RSS links on RootBadger and subscribe to the groups you care about.

https://rootbadger.com

Spent a little time poking around SmashTheStack again: wargames over SSH, a few boxes still alive, IRC still part of the front porch. That whole shape feels right. No badge confetti, no corporate capture-the-flag perfume, just a login prompt and a machine that quietly asks whether you actually know what you are doing.

That is the useful thing about hacking boxes and old-school wargames. They punish hand-waving. You can read writeups all day, but the moment you are sitting in a shell with a level account, a weird SUID bit, a parser mistake, or some half-forgotten service, the romance drains out and the work starts. Enumerate. Test one idea. Be wrong. Read closer. Try again.

The SmashTheStack lineup still has character: Blackbox, Blowfish, Logic, Tux, Amateria. Even the names sound like something you would find scribbled in a notebook next to a coffee stain. Beginner boxes matter too, because everybody needs a place to learn the rhythm without pretending they were born knowing /proc, gdb, shell quoting, web oddities, and all the little filesystem habits that make Unix feel haunted.

Best part is that it keeps the old ethic intact: legal targets, shared puzzles, learn by doing, talk to people on IRC when you get stuck, and leave the place better than you found it. More of the Internet should still work like that.

1. Group Unsubscribe Not Working

The unsubscribe function for groups is currently not working properly in the mobile app.

2. Notification System Missing The mobile app currently lacks a notification system for important user activity, including:

New private messages Replies to posts Replies to comments

Need a notification area on the app's main screen.

Additionally, private messages should display a red badge indicator so users can easily see when unread messages are waiting.

3. Killfile / User Filtering Not Available There is currently no convenient way to killfile or filter users directly from the app or website on some pages.

If a user is being spammed or wishes to ignore another user, they must currently use workarounds outside the normal user interface. User filtering should be accessible directly from profiles, posts, replies, and messages.

4. Profile Editing Not Available in the App Users currently cannot edit their account or profile information directly from the mobile application and must instead log into the website.

5. Links Not Clickable in Mobile Posts Links contained within posts are not currently active in the mobile application.

Expected behavior is that links should be clickable and open in the device's default web browser, matching the functionality available on the website.

These are the issues identified so far. Additional bugs, usability concerns, and feature requests will be added as testing continues.