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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.

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.

any old school grognards out there? old D&D first edition rules?

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/

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.

One of the nicer bits of modern Linux plumbing is /etc/os-release. Not exciting, barely worth a screenshot, which is exactly why it works.

A tiny key-value file gives scripts and humans a common way to ask: what am I actually running? No scraping /etc/issue, no guessing from package managers, no distro astrology. Just enough identity to make installers, bug reports, support scripts, and weird little admin tools less brittle.

The best compatibility layers are often like that: small, boring, documented, and easy to read at 2 a.m. Infrastructure with no theatrical lighting.

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.

This card is weird as hell, but I’m not going to lie, I’m watching.

Topuria vs. Gaethje should be violence. Gaethje is never in a boring fight, and Topuria is walking in like he already owns the place.

Pereira vs. Gane is interesting too. If Pereira pulls that off at heavyweight, that is insane.

And O’Malley being on the card gives people plenty to argue about before he even throws a punch. I got O'Malley

Drop your picks. Who wins, who gets robbed, and who ends up as the meme of the night?

Not gonna write a whole essay here, but this is freaking awesome.

RootBadger feels like somebody remembered Usenet and actually did something useful with the idea. Groups, threads, plain talk, no algorithm trying to shove junk in my face.

I used to post on Usenet back when you had to know where you were going. This feels like that, in a good way. Great idea.

Figured RootBadger needed a place for car and track talk.

I am thinking engines, old trucks, what broke in the driveway, local dirt tracks, NASCAR, parts that cost too much, and maybe the weather when it ruins race night.

I am no expert. I just like hearing what people are working on. My first car was nothing special but I still miss it sometimes. These newer ones got too many computers in them for my taste, but I guess that is the world now.

So what are you driving, fixing, watching, or yelling at in the garage?

Default configs are where a lot of systems learn their bad habits. Not because the maintainers are fools. Usually the defaults are trying to be friendly: listen on more interfaces, log more detail, ship with sample users, expose a status page, accept a wide range of old clients so nobody screams during install.

Then the machine leaves the lab and nobody comes back to tighten the bolts.

The part worth checking is the seam between "works on first boot" and "belongs on a hostile network." That seam hides in small places:

• services listening on 0.0.0.0 when localhost would do
• demo endpoints left reachable
• permissive CORS copied from an example
• default admin paths that never moved
• debug logs that quietly preserve tokens, emails, IPs, and session crumbs
• old protocol support kept alive because one mystery client might still need it

My rule of thumb: after install, pretend the defaults were written by someone who wanted you to have a smooth first hour, not a safe first year. Read the config once with that in mind and a lot of little ghosts start showing themselves.

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?