Latest posts
The ten most recent publications.
The 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 post →
Journalist 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 post →
The 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, names the pitfalls such as a lost Wi-Fi connection or missing HDMI input switching, and explains where DNS filters like Pi-hole fit in.
Read post →
On 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 post →
On 22 October 2026, the Indian certificate authority eMudhra announced that it is withdrawing from the global TLS certificate business. The trigger was an incident in which the private keys of eight intermediate certificates had been generated so weakly that anyone could recover them from the certificates and use them to issue certificates for any domain. This post puts the press release into context using Mozilla's bug report and shows why browsers were protected quickly while many other programs still need an update.
Read post →
On 21 October 2026 the PHP team closed two critical vulnerabilities with 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35 that let attackers run code without logging in; on 23 October a third vulnerability followed that can only be exploited in rare configurations and against which a single setting helps until the next release. I show how to check whether the update has really arrived, and how to protect servers until then with a multipart block in Caddy or Apache and the official PHP settings. That includes an honest assessment of how easily the vulnerabilities can be exploited as things stand, what the stopgaps cost and what should stay after the update.
Read post →
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 post →
In 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 post →
Sascha 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 post →
During 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 post →