bk99.de
Notes from the Neugier:Lab.
907 posts connect my own projects with Linux, network practice, DIY, standards and curated tech history.
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The ten most recent publications.
For October 2026 I set myself the goal of publishing one post on bk99.de every day, and with this review it came to 33 posts in 31 days. It was not easy, not even with my SoftwareSklave at my side and on top of ordinary everyday stress. Looking back, one thread runs through almost all the texts: what mattered almost always lay one level deeper than the first display, report or default setting.
Read postheise online reports from the RIPE 93 meeting of the European IP address registry in Sofia, where network operators debated how vulnerable their infrastructure is to US sanctions. The trigger is the Italian provider Autistici/Inventati: after the US sanctions authority OFAC designated it, the .org registry suspended its domain, its bank froze its accounts, and 10,000 blogs, 1,500 websites and 16,000 mailboxes disappeared. Topics included moving ripe.net, the mutual dependency of DNS and RPKI, a European alternative to Let's Encrypt and the RIPE NCC's withdrawal from the US cloud.
Read postThis evening I connected a 12 V light strip with WS2811 chips to an Amica NodeMCU board and brought it onto the Wi-Fi with the free firmware WLED. The way there led through a flash backup, flickering that a single resistor fixed, and the question of how long the strip actually is. This post lists the steps, the pitfalls and a counting trick that finds the length of any WS2811 strip in a minute.
Read postIn security advisory GHSA-99cj-7hg9-mp4m, the TianoCore project describes a buffer overflow in the PXE driver of EDK II, found by Alex Matrosov (Anthropic) and Dan Holmes-Mitra (Google). A crafted ICMP error message during network boot can execute code in the firmware before Secure Boot or measured boot have verified anything. Because a public pull request broke the embargo months early, the fix is available in the source code, while it is unclear when vendors will ship firmware updates.
Read postIn a post by its project maintainer, Stalwart Labs announces version 1.0 of the mail and collaboration server written in Rust, five years after the first commit. The focus is a final database schema, meant to let future updates run without data migration, and a performance push with rewritten parsers, fewer database round trips and a new full-text search. This post shows what operators need to check when moving from 0.16, how robust the comparison with Postfix and Dovecot is and why the project no longer publishes its tests.
Read postIn a report on five attack chains found with Claude, Anthropic's Frontier Red Team describes a race condition in the Linux kernel's TCP stack that lets a remote attacker without credentials run commands as root on servers with a Multipath TCP listener (CVE-2026-98432). The bug sits in the setup of IPv4 connections and is fixed in all maintained stable kernels, but Ubuntu and Red Hat had not shipped complete updates by the end of October 2026. Go makes the flaw more serious: since version 1.24, Go programs on Linux open their listeners with MPTCP by default, so many services meet the precondition without their operators knowing.
Read postThe occasion was Brennen Puth’s post “Websites Should Be Printable”, discussed on Hacker News on 26 October 2026. A test print showed that until then bk99.de printed its menu, social bar and table of contents, that a single post took up to 14 pages, and that dark mode put light grey text on white paper. This post shows the print rules in place since 26 October, how they work with light and dark mode, and how to check the result automatically.
Read postJournalist Yanis Mhamdi publishes a letter in the French online outlet Blast in which Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, on 22 October 2026, asks the four major internet providers to be ready to block Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram for a few hours via DNS filtering on instruction; X was added later. According to the minutes of a video conference the following day, the providers doubted feasibility, effectiveness and legal basis, and the block was not triggered for the demonstration on 24 October. This post explains the technology and the legal framework and takes a clear stand: keeping a switch ready to cut communication channels is censorship and has no place in a democracy, no matter how well it works.
Read postThe developer Cretezy shows how to run Android TV devices such as a Chromecast with Google TV or Hisense TVs without the ad banner and without ads. At the heart of the guide is a set of ADB commands that sets a different launcher as the home screen, disables the Google launcher, replaces YouTube with SmartTube and remaps the remote. This post summarises the steps and pitfalls, explains where DNS filters like Pi-hole fit in and adds our own experience with a Philips TV on Android TV 8.
Read postOn kaba.cx, an affected person describes how, from 2 October 2026, around 333 Tor exit relays redirected SSH connections to interception servers, and how these relays were tracked down and removed from the network. Behind the attack was the long-known OpenSSH backdoor Ebury in version 1.8.3, which had already been installed on the relay operators' servers in August. This post adds the incident report of an affected operator and shows how to recognise Ebury and why keys instead of passwords make the difference here.
Read postAll posts by decade and year of publication.