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.