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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.

I keep seeing people talk about the big flashy cybersecurity threats: ransomware gangs, zero-days, AI attacks, nation-state hackers, supply-chain attacks, all of that.

And yeah, that stuff matters.

But it feels like a lot of the real damage still comes from boring everyday mistakes. Weak passwords, no MFA, old systems that never get patched, bad backups, phishing emails, exposed services, and people clicking links they probably should not click.

So what do you think people still underestimate the most?

Is it phishing? Bad patching? Cloud mistakes? Users? Companies being cheap? Something else?

I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has actually had to clean up after a breach or a security mess.

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.

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.

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?