The Cryptax Award H2 2025 is out! (lol)

Best talks, papers, CTF challenges, tools I encountered in the second half of 2025:

https://cryptax.github.io/nomination-2025-h2/

It's a difficult selection, as always, and it is very personal opinion!

Congratulations to those who are listed, and kudos to others :)

@pancake @UYBHYS @rootme_org

@stefanct yep i have 2GB swap

@stefanct the mouse doesnt respond, the cpu gets hot as hell, cant access via ssh or switch to terminal. After 20’ screen gets black. All i can do is a hard poweroff with the physical button

@looking_for_a_shoegaze_drummer this @Blender 3D modelling software adds new amazing features everytime i check it. But i didnt expected music to be in there

woag blender music

@schrotthaufen and i bet there’s a kernel config that makes this work fine somehow but i’m too old for this stuff and I expect default mainstream distros to work well for basic stuff at least

@schrotthaufen i mean it’s also sad that i can’t “make -j” c++ projects for the same reason. It’s at the end a linux problem. Because none of this happens in macOS and the UI even with wayland it’s the first victim. 2025 feels like the 90’s in this aspect xD

@schrotthaufen i wish i didnt needed 64GB of ram to compile a hello world

Rust is the new forkbomb. Cant say how many times i had to reboot my i7 32GB ubuntu because “cargo b” was just killing the whole system

@wader surreal xD

If you are blaming or blessing AI without specifying which model, which prompts, which tools, which workflows and procedures and usecases it’s pretry clear that you have no idea what you are talking about

Few less lines in this refactoring

@th this problem can be clearly solved with AI: “ps aux | grep | mai ‘from the data received, output the same listing without including the line where the grep process appears’”

OpenAI’s real world practice experience on vibecoding the Sora Android app. I quite agree on all exposed here. In short: use AI as a tool and only in expert hands.

https://openai.com/index/shipping-sora-for-android-with-codex/

Dropping this session here in case anyone needs some Acid https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=vmkGIHMgkaM

@BasicAppleGuy 😢 i have them also pilled around trying to find an excuse to not throw them.. for years. I’m not yet a man I guess

Actually with 5.2 you can disable the reasoning again! (It was removed in 5.0 and 5.1), hope their way becomes an openapi standard and the rest of providers adopt it

Today 3 more people were enlightened with r2ai. Always happy to hear some good results even from people that don’t know a single r2 command

Just tried gpt5.2 for some coding tasks and it was basically brilliant. Expensive but totally worth for the final code quality