bk99.de
Notes from the Neugier:Lab.
883 posts connect my own projects with Linux, network practice, DIY, standards and curated tech history.
The index is only loaded when you use it and is then filtered locally in your browser.
The ten most recent publications.
For decades, a Russian shortwave channel has been humming around the clock on 4625 kHz, known as “The Buzzer” or by the misread callsign UVB-76. According to everything radio monitors have reconstructed, the hum belongs to a military command network that now and then sends short, coded voice messages. This post separates evidence from myth and shows how to follow the channel yourself on my receiver owrx.bk99.de.
Read postIn its video on Linux 7.3, released on 18 October 2026, the YouTube channel Maple Circuit focuses on the changes to the btrfs file system. According to David Sterba's pull request, the release brings noticeable performance gains for direct I/O, copy-on-write and fsync, plus changed mount options that admins should know about before updating. This post explains the changes based on the patches on the mailing list and puts the quoted measurements into context.
Read postSascha Friesike, professor and director at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, explains on the rbb channel Menschen und Muster why AI will not replace human work in the foreseeable future but will change it. The video draws on three research findings: Polanyi's paradox of tacit knowledge, Lisanne Bainbridge's ironies of automation and the observation that expectations grow with technical possibilities. This post summarises the arguments, checks the cited studies and shows what follows for working with AI in everyday professional life.
Read postDuring the night to 12 October 2026, unknown attackers took over the refrigeration controllers in hundreds of French supermarkets and heated up freezers, spoiling the goods. According to the manufacturer Danfoss and the French authority CERT-FR, the cause was refrigeration controllers that were directly reachable from the internet and lacked current firmware. This post puts the incident into context and summarises what CERT-FR and the German BSI now advise operators of networked controllers.
Read postThe General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) decided in Versailles that Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) will run without leap seconds from 20 May 2027 and may drift up to one hour from Earth’s rotation. The trigger was the looming first negative leap second, which experts put at a 30 percent probability by 2035 and which has never been applied. This post explains why leap seconds have knocked servers offline, how Google and others smear them, and what operators of NTP, chrony and radio clocks should know now.
Read postWith FLUX 3 Image Klein, Black Forest Labs has released an open image model with 5.6 billion parameters that generates images, edits them with up to ten reference images and places image elements via bounding boxes. According to the vendor, it runs with INT8 on graphics cards with as little as 8 GB and beats larger open models in internal comparisons. This post explains the technology and shows what the mandatory separate prompt upsampler, the memory figures and the first community experiences mean for running it on your own hardware.
Read postCitizen Lab and Confiant have provided the first technical proof that targeted online advertising is used to install spyware on devices without any click, and call the method AdFection. The Israeli company Discover-Tech bought ads via Google, Yandex and other ad exchanges and handed selected targets over to spyware vendors such as Candiru; at Al Jazeera, at least 45 devices were attacked this way. The investigation shows how real-time auctions, advertising IDs and third-party code in ads together form an attack surface against which ad blockers are so far the main defence.
Read postLinus Torvalds has published his first patch series created with the help of an AI coding assistant: ten patches meant to solve a scalability problem in reading from the page cache that has been known for years. In an artificial test with 64 threads, reads per second increase 23-fold, which according to Torvalds will be much less in real use. Just a few hours after publication, kernel developer Kiryl Shutsemau found a race condition in review and supplied the fix along with it.
Read postIn October 2026 I wrote my own firmware for the GeekMagic SmallTV Ultra, a cube-shaped Wi-Fi display with an ESP8266: KAC, the KleinerAnzeigeComputer ("little display computer"). It shows the throughput of my two internet lines, the state of the firewall and the NAS disks in rotation, does not flicker and broadcasts no open Wi-Fi in normal operation. The firmware can be installed directly through the update page of the factory firmware, and this post shows how to build your own dashboard for it.
Read postThe w1700k-sdr project turns the Gemtek W1700K Wi-Fi 7 router into a wideband SDR receiver that delivers up to 320 million complex samples per second from the 2.4, 5 and 6 GHz bands over 10 GbE to a Linux host. To do this, the MediaTek MT7996 radio runs nothing but home-made firmware, rebuilt register by register from traces of the original firmware. The host shows spectrum and waterfall in the browser, and frequency, gain and filter can be changed while the stream is running.
Read postAll posts by decade and year of publication.