I am back. I left Kuala Lumpur on sunday and I hadn’t the time to report on what was going on as I have been busy talking to people all the time and being in permanent combat with my Jetlag. I needed days to adjust and before you know it its over. Now I had some days to recover and I am sort of on my way to re-adjust to European timings. But all this has been quite stressful for me, surprisingly.

But this doesn’t apply to the conference itself which was very interesting. Thanks to Dhillon (aka l33tdawg) and his lovely crew for the overwhelmingly warm welcome and the overall good handling of everything. Special thanks also to Belinda and Amy who have been the most active and visible people for me. But there are many more who did work behind the scenes and have been generally helpful.

That said: it was easy for me to concentrate on the HITBSecConf2005 conference itself, a rather weird feeling for me as I am usually so busy with everything that I can’t really enjoy any talks at the Chaos Communication Congress. In KL it was different: I tried to follow as much talks as possible and the only one I really missed was the final goodbye event due to being too tired.

I will wrap up some notes on given talks in following postings.

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.

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.

Oh my god. I swear I will never ever listen to people if they say I wouldn’t need my laptop during travel.

So now I am in Bulgaria and have found a cool place: a small island near Burgas and there is an international workshop camp going on: Net User 3 Conference on a small Alcatraz-style island called Bolshevik. It’s just plain beautiful.

I am using another girl’s mac laptop now and I am happy to be able to have at least 50% of my setup running. I am not sure how much I can blog about this but it’s a cool event and I hope I can summarize a bit later on.

I think I found the place on Google Maps: it’s here.

Hanging ‚round in the world without your laptop can be fun. But having no clue what your passwords are because you forgot to print your keychain can be real horror. If you want to get in touch with me you better use SMS until I’m back.

Due to technical problems on the provider side, this weblog has been unavailable for a while. And due to personal preferences on my side, I haven’t had any incentive to post content here as well.

The conference program is finalized. So let me have a look what looks interesting to me. I am sure I won’t attend all the listed events, but at least I can try. Here’s my rundown of the first two days.

Day 1

• Opening and Keynote address: Rop and Emmanuel will address the crowd and definitely address the big problems hackers face these days.
• Free software in the boardroom: Arjen – a renowned activist in the Netherlands – tries to explain how huge companies work and how board members see things. If you don’t know how these brains work, how can you change them?
• Attacks on Digital Passports: now that it looks like we have to live with them, we need to understand their flaws to protect ourselves.
• Electricity consumption in your home: sounds like fun.

Day 2

• Physical Security: this talk was a big hit at 21C3 and will be here as well
• Quantum Cryptography – An Introduction: Stephanie is going through the details of the future
• The Pentabarf conference planning software: I should absolutely not miss my own talk
• Evolutionary Computation: unless you are absolutely into conference planning you should prefer Eric’s talk over mine ;)

At the entrance at What The Hack the crew has placed an x-ray security scanner (you know, one of these they use at airports) for the people to play around. But when the system was first setup it asked for a three digit passcode.

The quick decision was to brute-force the system and to just get a bunch of motivated people trying out ten numbers each. Well, everything worked according to Murphy’s law, which means that they had to try out more than 90% of the numbers before finding the right one.

„So what was the code“, you ask?

We could have guessed it: it was 911.