24C3 - report part 9 - Security Nightmares 2008

Frank and Ron filled the "told you so"-karma with the annual Security Nightmares presentation/brainstorming. After a short retrospect they had a look into the crystal ball. Some predictions that were mentioned:

• hijacking of industrial robots will increase
• people will go to jail due to wrong time zone configuration of log servers
• more flash memory problems - e.g. no proper cleaning possible
• more VoIP-hacks
• hacking of large scale storage/computing backends like Amazon S3
• malware for mobile phones especially on iPhone
• crowed-sourcing for breaking CAPTCHA
  

24C3 - report part 8 - Some photo impressions 2

An some more pics ...

A speech bubble machine

Indymedia searches safe habor

"We hate flash"
The ceiling of conference room 1

Quadrocopter

Smiling light

Monitored

Usual suspect

24C3 - report part 7 - Some photo impressions 1

Here are some photos I took at the conference. It's not allowed to take photos downstairs in the so called Hackcenter so no documentation of that.

The congress center with the famous CCC rocket and some decoration

Hacker Jeopardy

Regarding politics

LED cube

MAKING with LEGO

Research lab

Another photo of the demonstration yesterday

Club-Mate - should be a platinum sponsor of this event

24C3 - report part 6 - Demonstration against data retention

I wrote some time ago about the new law for data retention in Germany. It passed all hurdles and will come into effect starting from the 1st January 2008. The connection meta data (phone, cell phone, internet) of all citizen of Germany will be stored for six month then. A law suit against this law will be started soon. The AK Vorratsdatenspeicherung organized a demonstration that took place here in Berlin starting in front of the congress center to protest against this and similar laws. There will be more demonstration in the near future. Check the calender if you want to join.

24C3 - report part 5 - resistence 23, GTD, MI5, rule 34, barcode hacking, and chicks for geeks

Ah, so much to do here. So just some of the highlights.

Yesterday Markus Beckedahl (netzpolitik.org!) gave some (23?) hints of how to fight for your rights starting from lobbying, creating and influencing media, coding etc.

FX of Phenoelit showed cool barcode hacks. Wanna have an upgrade of you flight ticket? Give it a go ...

Another highlight yesterday was definitely the rule 34 content. For good reason this was not recorded. It was great fun!

The morning today started with a presentation by Annie Machon. She was working for the British intelligence service MI5 but became a whistleblower and had to escape from England. She showed the dark (and unfortunately growing side) side of the spy world.

In a workshop Machtelt tough some single geeks how to get a girl by following some simple advices.


Stephan Schmieder introduced the audience of room 3 to the productivity system Getting Things Done. I am using it since some years and share his experiences. The recommended the program ThinkingRock for implementing it. It looks quite bloated to me and I am very happy with jpilot (which I also can use to sync to my smartphone), but I will give it good.

24C3 - report part 4 - raw videos available

Niiice ... for people who didn't make it to the conference and missed the live stream of a talk - there some raw dumps online.

HTTP 1: http://server.c-otto.de/mitschnitte/
HTTP 2: http://mirror.engelkotzen.net/
FTP: ftp://88.198.6.181/pub/24c3

[via Marius News Blog]

24C3 - report part 3 - the future of e-books

There was a talk (German) by Steini (*) about the current status of e-books and the future developments in the morning session today. It covered the few current available e-book readers and the status of displaying technologies (e-ink, bistable LCD displays, visplex, etc.). Although e-books are quite promising the available ones (mainly the Sony libre, Sony Reader, iliad iRex, Amazon Kindle (**)) are too expensive and not mature (slow, bad interfaces, restrictions, lacking features).

Steini thinks that in future due to the low energy consumption and better readability of the e-books they might fill the gaps that the PDAs were suppose to fill. Kids will carry them to school, smaller text books (around 50 pages, less redundancy) will be feasible to be produced, new business models without publisher might come up. Book sharing, automatically transfered manuals of new gadgets and interactive stories are other presented implications.

Some design studies

As I am quite interested in this topic I talked afterwards with Steini. He mentioned that his company is currently working on creating an e-book reader that covers all the important features and lack the teething problems. Well, he is definitely biased but I am curious about the result, that will not only included the reader itself but also the necessary web platform. We will see the result hopefully in a year.

(*) the description of him in the wiki of this year is quite poor so I link to the one of last year
(**) During the later discussion also the OLPC was mentioned as a possible e-book reader. This was proposed also at O'Reilly Radar once.

24C3 - report part 2 - DNA hacking and web security ooopses

I just listen to two cool talks (actually sitting in a sofa down in the Hackcenter watching the live stream :)):

At first: Drew Endy (MIT - Department of Biological Engineering) introduced the audience to molecular, computational and synthetic biology and showed the connection to Making. He mentioned the possible security issues that come up with decreasing prices of DNA synthesising and the availability of sequences of harmful organisms. The talk ended with the question if there will be soon the "Biological Hacker". I have a stream dump of the talks if anybody is interested.

Second: Dan Kaminsky gave one of his legendary talks ... hilarious! He added more examples to the collection of web security oopses by describing how to exploit really bad design bugs. Starting form DNS rebinding, to an IFrame-Flash-hack to "IP via SPAM" (some live demos included). I am sure I didn't get everything completely but it was great fun!

Dan Kaminsky in action:

Conclusions:

24C3 - report part 1 - intro

Today the 24 Chaos Communication Congress (24C3) the annually hacker meeting organized by the Chaos Computer Club started in Berlin. Here you can find lots of inspiring talks, cool workshops and interesting people. Hacking (in the broadest sense), making, privacy and politic issues and many other topics are covered. The theme"Volldampf voraus" (German for "full steam ahead") is inspired by the retrofuture steam punk genre and you can see at some place of the conference related accessories.


As usually I am mainly hanging out at the OpenBSD booth and am frequently visiting talks and workshops. I will report about some selected stuff in the next days. There are live streams of the talks if you want to watch them yourself and the videos will be available for download some month after the congress.

Google teaches how to enhance privacy

The Google Blog informs us that the Google Privacy Channel has started offering advice how to enhance privacy when using Google products. Well, nice try but I hope Nat Torkington is right and we can see soon the Google Privacy Dashboard

... where consumers can view all the information that Google has about them, request the deletion of any of that information, and download privacy-enhancing tools such as cookie cleaners.

Yes, we had the hope already earlier ...

Knowledge Mega Mirror - SPIEGEL opens archive

DER SPIEGEL ("the mirror" in German), Europe's biggest magazine, will open its archive beginning of 2008. As announced the publisher's subsidiary company SPIEGELnet and the Wissen Media Group will set up SPIEGEL Wissen. There the SPIEGEL articles starting from 1947 will be combined with content from Wikipedia and the Bertelsmann-Lexika. Only the current issue needs a subscription.

It's a great step and a lot of knowledge will be made freely accessible. I am looking forward to see how they will implement the mashup of the different sources.

[via Wikemedia Blog]

OPEN proposal online

Just saw that the proposal for the Open Practises E-science Network (OPEN) is online at Nature Precedings. Nice job, guys!

Wikipedia license update

As Lawrence Lessig reports Wikipedia has made a resolution to update it's license and make it compatible with a Creative Commons license:

It is hereby resolved that:

• The Foundation requests that the GNU Free Documentation License be modified in the fashion proposed by the FSF to allow migration by mass collaborative projects to the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license;
• Upon the announcement of that relicensing, the Foundation will initiate a process of community discussion and voting before making a final decision on relicensing.

There is a video of the announcement by Jimmy Wales (I found a transcript of it here).

OpenCON 2007

Since yesterday the OpenCON 2007 - a yearly conference only dedicated to OpenBSD - is taking place in Venice. Around 130 developers and users having a good time here and are socializing (as usually) very well. There were some very helpful tutorials yesterday and now the we have a packed schedule of talks. We expect to celebrate a good OpenSSH birthday party tonight. I hope to finally get started with porting some applications to OpenBSD and Bernd's tutorial (will be online soon) was excellent start for that.