Archiv für den Monat: September 2005

Touched down

Veröffentlicht am von
1

I am in Kuala Lumpur now and have taken camp in a luxury hotel room with a view on the Petronas Towers. Excellent. This this building looks huge, but it is difficult to tell from here. Won’t find the time to get a closer look before the evening.

I actually arrived yesterday but I fell asleep because of the jet lag after 20 hours of traveling. Now I am up and running again and ready to take part in the HITBSecCon2005 conference which I am here for to talk about Blinkenlights and the CCC.

Everything seems to be well organized here. Just the Westin Hotel’s ISP (MagiNet) sucks because they try to charge awful amounts of money to the HITBSecConf2005 organizers for providing WLAN for the participants. Think of 13.000 USD for three days of WLAN! Unbelievable and I guess they are going to have a hard time once this information gets passed on the the hotel manager which must understand that this ISP is really hurting their business.

So I opted for paying for Internet on my hotel room which costs around 6 EUR a day. Speed could be worse but what really upsets me is that they are intercepting SMTP traffic on port 25. I am not saying they are blocking it. They are intercepting it! So this basically means they are getting in my flow and could probably get my authentication information if my e-mail client isn’t smart enough to automatically detect its connected to the wrong server. Let’s call this a man in the middle attack by the ISP. Unbearable. It’s really time to create a working OpenVPN setup for me.

Talking in Kuala Lumpur

Veröffentlicht am von
5

End of the month, I am going to talk on CCC activities in general and more specifically on Project Blinkenlights on the upcoming HITBSecConf 2005 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. There is a nice page describing my talk.

This is new ground for me as I haven’t been to Asia so far except my travel to Sri Lanka beginning of this year. I am really looking forward to this event and meeting some speakers we had at 21C3 and some we are probably going to see at 22C3. I am really curious to see the cultural differences which I expect to be extensive in one way (people and country) and probably similar (hacker culture).

If you have any hints for me regaling Kuala Lumpur (and Singapore which I hope to be able to meet for a day or so) feel free to leave a note here.

Living the future

Veröffentlicht am von
3

The last days, I tried to stay in close contact with american blogs covering the whole Katrina tragedy and especially Jacob Appelbaum who is currently in New Orleans (and before in Houston) together with Joel Johnson trying to help people setting up technology.

Today he arrived in Algiers (here is Joel’s report), a part of New Orleans not affected by flooding, and set up a iSight camera with a PowerBook with QuickTime Broadcaster. It was really cool: just chatting, we managed to set up everything remotely in just a few minutes. They were running everything on battery as the generator was down that moment.

Our CCC streaming server is now broadcasting the stream from Germany whenever their uplink is running. With QuickTime Player, you can receive the stream from here: rtsp://dss.berlin.ccc.de/algiers.sdp. If you get a 404 error it means their upload stream isn’t working (either it’s switched off or the uplink is broken). Just try again later. You might want to follow Jacob’s blog on when you expect the stream to be online.

We are living the future. Too bad the future is in such a bad shape currently.

The Big Katrina Fuckup

Veröffentlicht am von
Antworten

For days I have been following the incredible and outraging events following the Hurricane Katrina but as Fefe has been digging up the dirt quite well and I sort of thought this time the evil empire would finally lose, I didn’t really know what to blog.

Trying to follow the interesting news, I found the following sources quite helpful and I would recommend subscribing to them:

It is getting clearer now that the US government is trying to cover its fuckup by all means, including violently stopping the media from reporting, blocking both the people outside and inside the desaster from information flowing. And its getting even worse. Worse than I could imagine. Reports of rape and murder in the Astrodome (in Houston!), the army bombing the levees to protect rich city areas and much more depressing stuff. I am not going to summarize it all here as the list of things happening and being reported is apparently endless.

Instead I urge you to follow Jacob Appelbaum’s blog who has moved to Houston yesterday and reports from the Astrodome and summarizes other information he gets on site:

http://jacob.wordpress.com/

He is also in close contact with the great people at Boing Boing who cover his activities as well.