[worble]

CTF is a game mode for popular online games like halo (or at least, that's how I know it), so paragraphs like

> My first CTF was HCKSYD, a 48-hour solo CTF. I full solved it and won in 2 hours. I was completely hooked. That led me to win DownUnderCTF, Australia's largest CTF, with Blitzkrieg multiple times. Blitzkrieg was one of Australia's strongest teams at the time. I later joined TheHackersCrew, an international top-tier team that was consistently ranked highly on CTFTime, the main global ranking and event calendar the scene uses as its scoreboard. With them, I competed in some of the most prestigious CTFs in the world, consistently placing well within the top 10 until the end of 2025.

Are still completely nonsensical to even those that understand the acronym

[trescenzi]

It's also a game people play in person as well. It's the same as the Halo version except you tag each other instead of shooting. It's really fun to play in big open areas with large teams.

[deathanatos]

Yeah.

As I remember it (and this was decades ago): Two teams, opposite ends of a large field. Each end gets a "flag". (We used t-shirts.) In our case, we split the field in half — our field happened to have a natural feature (a change in elevation, so like two separately flat areas separated by an incline) that worked well for this. If you were tackled¹ in the enemy's side, you were "captured", and "jailed". An uncaptured player could spring the jail by tagging those within it. Returning to your flag with the opposing team's flag was a win.

We played at night, so stealth was a large part of the game, but it was also fair to illuminate the area around the flag. (Which made approaching a guarded flag … tricky.)

I'm sure there's probably a million variations on the specifics.

¹…flag football flags would probably work nicely for this.

[RugnirViking]

though this is not what the author is talking about. Theyre talking about a hacking competition, where you compete to get a secret word or something contained on some running server connected to a network protected with various means. They're complaining about AI agents removing a lot of the fun from this.

People are mad because we're literally on "hacker" news, so there is some expectation that people might be familiar with hacking or computer security.

[acters]

Yeah, but we have AI now, we don't need our blog posts to over explain or state what it all means to general audiences. The author name-drops a bunch of CTF events hosted by a variety of independent organizations and name-drops well-known teams.

To help everyone, this Capture The Flag is specifically Cybersecurity adjacent, there is a Wikipedia article on it as the top Google search result for me when searching "CTF". This is why the acronym is used, because searching for the full will get you to the wrong "sport" vs the cybersecurity one.

I don't want to explain what a CTF is. look at the Wikipedia article. It is there for a good reason.

[itsboring]

Unreal Tournament and Quake 2 for me.