blog_

I pulled a 9B 'Mythos' model off Hugging Face, the kind with a borrowed famous name and a stranger's benchmark brags, and checked it the way you'd check anything you don't trust. Supply chain, GGUF metadata, chat template, then its behaviour run offline with the network watched, then every claim on its model card put to the test. The short version: it is safe to run, unsafe to trust, and most of the page is myth.

When you download a model you are downloading a file, and the file is in one of about six formats. Most people never look at which. They should, because the format decides whether opening it can run code on your machine before the model does anything at all. One common format hands a stranger a shell on your box by design. Another was invented to take that away. A field guide.

I put a cheap 'smart' Android projector on my network before trusting it on the TV, and spent a weekend pulling it apart. Inside: an unauthenticated root register console listening on the LAN, SELinux switched to Permissive, two shipped root backdoors, an app store that installs unsigned APKs over plain HTTP with a hardcoded signing key, and cleartext telemetry home. The one thing they got right was firmware signing, and everything around it leaks.

I reverse-engineered and revived a dead game server over a weekend. Here's what's actually inside one: a world that lives in RAM, a hand-rolled binary protocol, a login dance that happens twice, Lua-scripted monster brains, and a pile of unchecked pointers waiting for the day the environment stops being kind to them.