Got spare time? Experienced with scissors? Then you might want to check out „『ロボットタイリク』ロボットカタガミ★２６„.

Hopefully, the title of this link actually actually displays in japanese characters in your browser. I have actually no clue what it means as I just copied and pasted it from the web site and do not understand a single concept of the japanese language. I hope it doesn‘t mean „Welcome To Adobe GoLive“ or something similar offensive :-)

But most probably, the title of the page won‘t reveal the same graphical impression to you as the creator of the page forgot to correctly encode the used character set (Shift-JIS) in his web page.

The creator probably assumed that nobody except japanese people would be interested in cutting out paper robots. He (or she) was wrong. And now the page looks a bit awkward when you first open it and your defauöt encoding is not Shift-JIS. So what can we do?

First, you can try to manually select the Shift-JIS encoding (also called „Character Set“ oder „Character Coding“) from the appropriate menu in your browser. This should fix the display of the page and of the page title as well (of course the title is still broken in Internet Explorer on the Mac even if you select the correct encoding).

Taking care of proper encodings and declaring the DOCTYPE of your web documents is important. It helps other people read what you are talking about. It helps browsers to properly render what you graphically intended.

Web standards are the glue of the information age. Let‘s apply it.

The Hackmeeting community is renowned for its discussion-based decision making. The whole event is organized via a single mailing list where everybody contributes and where everything is being discussed over and over until a decision can be made that is backed by most or everybody on the list.

One of these decisions is to have a restricted access to the Internet. One of the reasons for it seems to be the good experience that was made with this in Catania two years ago where there was no Internet at all.

When I look around the rooms where people sit and work with their machines I see them doing basically the same things I am used to see at the Congress: trading files, watching some movies, playing Quake a bit, working with the command line and so on. The servers are filled with the usual mix of ripped media: audio, video and books. Quite a lot of Linux installed, almost no Windows in sight. I have seen around five Macs so far but some people confuse me when they look on my screen asking: „Ah! This is Mac OS X? Quite beautiful…“.

So the only real change is the absence of external web pages. But this also means: no researching, no updates, no search engines, no news, no web services. I don‘t get it but nobody seems to complain. They are busy discussing and learning which is not a bad thing.

I no longer make a distinction between Internet and Intranet. I can‘t work without Internet being „on“. I use it like a bookshelf and I feel handicapped if my favourite encyclopedias are gone.

DECODER was a printed magazine in italy focusing on computer culture. Today it no longer exists in printed form but as a web site. Among other things it features an old interview with Wau Holland.

The publishing activity of Decoder has transformed into ShaKe Edizioni Underground. They are publishing mainly italian translations of books important to the electronic underground like Crypto of Steven Levy (also author of the famous books „Hackers“ and „Insanely Great„).

I just finished my talk on Blinkenlights. It took quite some time to organize the setup but the crew in the end managed to get the microphone fixed. I am still proud of my new toy, the best-spent 10 dollars ever: Clicker. Doing a presentation with a phone can still be considered rather cool and I love cool things.

After the talk I got invited to a Wardriving session. So now I am sitting inside a japanese car driving through Torino heading to the Fiat headquarters. I am on the front seat, with three young hackers in the back (16/17/20).

Fiat is to Torino what Stuttgart is to Mercedes-Benz (or to be more precise: to Daimler-Chrysler). The town basically lives from Fiat. I guess there is more Volkswagen in Wolfsburg than Fiat in Torino. But it just a rough estimate and one of these totally meaningless infobits.

After ten minutes at Piazza Bernini AirSnort discovers the first network. I had some doubts if wardriving works inside a car without extra antennas. The first network has no password set, so it‘s open. So easy. I was told that wireless security is still a new concept in Italy. I believe it.

It took quite some time for my talk to begin because the crew was playing a weird theatre-style game about sex and computers. I didn‘t really get it as everything was in italian and I left my personal translation assistant at home. But everybody was dressed-up, in good mood and they danced and played strange games so there was a forced delay before I could start with my stuff. Because of the heat I was drinking a lot and unfortunately the coldest drink was beer. So I was already quite pissed when I did my talk. Now the fast driving style are probing my stomach. Hope this is not becoming too embarassing for me.

The second network was discovered. This time it is encrypted with WEP. We move on. For a while a police car precedes us with the flash light on. We look a bit like one of these Corps Diplomatique in Berlin. Next stop at the central post office. This time it is two networks at the same. Weird configuration. No results. We proceed. My stomach makes a nervous move.

My PowerBook sucks. It goes off every now and then because of the vibration caused by italian streets and italian driving style. Hope my stomach is more resistant than my battery contact. Passing Fiat headquarters. No network. Hmm.

It is pretty obvious Italians have a totally different approach compared to Germans when it comes to things like traffic lights. We are trying not to risk too much so we are actually respecting all traffic lights fnord. But everybody else does not really care at all. A red light is somehow considered „alien“ and is easily ignored.

We are driving around banks, supermarkets and other areas. Here and there a signal gets caught but noting strong enough to be able actually have a look inside. I am getting tired. Signal! We stop in the middle of the street. We are standing in front of „Caserma Vittorio da Bormida“. No encryption. No DHCP. Channel 6. Poking around a bit. No results.

The tour ends with a snack at one of these caravan food boxes. I choose sausage in bread – north italian style. Actually quite tasty. Now fatigue is coming over me like the shadow of plane passing by. We drive back to Hackmeeting. Finish typing. Send message. Log off. EOT.

More T-Shirts from Hackmeeting:

There is a live streaming in place at Hackmeeting. It is run by radio#cybernet and they are broadcasting live 24 hours a day (at least so they say). The web site says they have been the first italian radio streaming in Ogg Vorbis format, but the current stream is MP3.

The live stream playlist link is http://www.kyuzz.org/radiocybernet/stream.pls. When I checked it was just a bunch of noise but maybe I just bumped into a temporary problem.

99% of the content will be in italian. The only exception is probably my talk, scheduled to take place at 22:00h today. Looks as if everything is behind schedule here a bit. So if you like, tune in. Maybe it even works :-)

Well, as on any hacker event, there are t-shirts for sale. Hackers love t-shirts as they allow to express meaningful, probably witty statements without any direct physical human interaction which comes in handy as hackers prefer to spend their time on interaction with the machine.

What was completely new to me is that the long-term idea of actually providing hacker underwear came to life. I am not sure if the penguin is really well-positioned or is capable of producing any extended sexual charm. But who knows? Of the 600 people at Hackmeeting around 10% seem to be women. We will see what happens.

Let‘s have a look at some other nerdwear at Hackmeeting:

Well, you know, I have been doing some other nerdwear in the last years. This business didn‘t get much attention recently and everybody is asking me what‘s next. Well, I guess there will be something happening at the Camp for sure.

Walking around I bumped into something familiar. Strange, I‘ve seen that face before. This looked like…

Yes. It looked like the ampflication system of of the original Blinkenlights installation. And in fact, it turned out to be a similar project. The young guy behind controls it via the parallel port and he was very submissive when he confessed that the software is just for Windows assuring me that his friend is actually just installing a Debian Linux on his second computer…. I told him not to miss my talk later (without revealing to many details :-)

Quite a lot of clones of Blinkenlights have evolved in the last two years. The web site of my favorite clone – LittleLights – actually provides an additional list of software resources especially for DOS and Windows (which is not that well supported by us :-). If you run Windows, have a look at tools like BlinkenPlayer Exxtreme and give us some feedback on its usability.

The Hackmeeting is a lovely event. Entry is free, everybody is helping out.

However, the network is weird. There is a firewall at the ISP nobody has access to. It already successfully blocks incoming traffic preventing use of certain services already. In addition, there is shaping (which I can understand) and even more port blocking installed at Hackmeeting. The only available ports are ssh, imaps, smtps, pop3, pop3s, smtp, imap. No public sniffer installed, but I guess some inofficial ones are running. I switched off my honeypot anyway.

So: no instant messaging possible so far. I am going to talk to the admins to get at least IRC, AIM and Jabber working. I wonder if anybody is using these protocols at all. I would consider free networking part of the game. There is some bandwidth paranoia and a idealistic preference for intranetworking in place I assume. I would prefer unhindered communication.

The above port list even means: no http. Just started a discussion about this as I don‘t get that point at all. Let‘s see what the outcome of all this will be. For me this would mean: no weblogging as I am using XML-RPC to post my stuff. It only works becaused I plugged my base station directly in the de-militarized zone, behind the firewall. And, oh my god, no anon-cvs as well. Useless.

I consider limited internet access to be one of the problems today: NAT and port blocking at the ISP side is already preventing people from using the net effectively. I want to set up servers, I want to access my machines from the outside, I want to do peer-to-peer networking, dynamic file exchange and most important: i want to experiment and learn with the network. With the current access mechanisms, this is not possible.

For the near future this means: i need my own VPN available to no longer suffer from weird restrictions.

I can only recommend having a spare Apple AirPort Base Station with you all the time. Makes you much more flexible when on the road. This Power-Over-Ethernet Adapter makes it even more useful.