Berlin in the cold war: on the top of an artificial hill called „Teufelsberg“ (devil‘s mountain) that was erected from the rubble of the final stages of the Second World War the NSA operated a huge field station essentially sitting in the heart of East Germany.

For a couple of years now the city of Berlin tried to get one or the other commercial project running but it all failed for either political reasons or mere incapability. Recently, the remaining security personal has been withdrawn and for a limited time it was possible to access the whole area.

The Chaos Computer Club undertook a couple of excursions to the field station and has put together a documentation with old maps, new photographs and explanations on how the facility was structured and operated: read NSA Field Station Teufelsberg Berlin – a late post mortem .

Enjoy!

A couple of weeks ago, I was happy to be able to attend the EuroFoo Camp, organized by O‘Reilly for small group of geeks and similar life forms. They really succeeded bringing together a bunch of bright heads and overall communication was best described by Rop when he said: „you have to explain everything 0.7 times before somebody gets it“.

archive.org hosts a nice video obviously produced by O‘Reilly for free redistribution. Check out the Euro Foo Video in various formats. It gives an impression on the atmosphere of the talks and presents two of the coolest hacks that have been demonstrated at EuroFoo: Adam demonstrating his Bluesnarfing tool live to the audience and Barry aka. The Toool showing how to open a Kensington Lock using the carton core of a toilet paper! There was this other remarkable demonstration recently but I think this is even cooler.

Doobee had doubts on the Bluesnarfing demo he saw at Defcon and obviously something must have gone terribly wrong as the demo ran without problems at Euro Foo. He first scanned the rooms for phones (you can see my „Phnord“ phone showing up in the video) and later demonstrated a read-out of a randomly chosen phone (of a vulnerable model of course).

Bluetooth statistics at EuroFoo were particular interesting. Adam was able to scan around 50 Bluetooth-enabled and „discoverable“ phones. I guess there were at least 100 Bluetooth-capable phones, but half of the crowd has probably switched off Bluetooth (or the phone completely) for the event. The really funny aspect of the statistics were that Adam did not find a single phone that was using a typical default name! Geeks.

I never understood my Mac OS X does not provide an easy way to combine multiple PDF files into a single one. However, PDFLab fills that gap quite nicely. Recommended.

IE7 by Dean Edward is such a cool hack: a bunch of JavaScript files that enable good old Internet Explorer for Windows to actually do CSS2, transparent PNG and other modern web techniques that standards-savvy web designers are begging Microsoft for for years now.

All you have to do is to include a single .js file in the header of each HTML file you want to enable it in and you‘re done. There is even an IE Favelet you use IE to „update“ standards-compliance on the fly for any web page you are just looking at. Amazing.

Oh yes:

• 0:18 Chaos is joy.
• 0:19 Order a necessary evil.
• 0:24 Death is o.k.
• 0:34 Religion is a party game for at least 2 persons.
• 1:01 Arcadia is everywhere.

Spend five minutes on reading them all: the english/german version „im uhrzeigersinn – directions for reality“ or the german/english version „clockwise – gebrauchsanweisung für die wirklichkeit“.

Befriend the primate within you!

As so many, I tried Skype for Mac OS X and tried to compare it to iChat AV which has been a quite impressive experience so far. But I must say that Skype has been at least impressive if not more.

The sound quality of that little net telephony application is gorgeous and the echo cancellation works so good that I can use the built-in microphone of my laptop without any hassle. The user interface is as simple as it can be (although there are a couple of small things that can be improved: it‘s much more windows-ish when it comes to drag & drap).

But i should mention problems as well: in one out of two connections there has been noisy hisses and other sound artefacts that might stem from bugs in the beta version or from the protocol itself. Difficult to tell and it will be interesting to follow the upcoming development. If they manage to stomp out these remaining issues they have a winner product in their hands that will give SIP-based telephony a hard time (although I don‘t think that‘s stoppable in any way).

Another advantage of Skype is it‘s disadvantage as well: using Skype you don‘t lock yourself out of any of your other communication systems. It‘s an extension. But of course you lock yourself into Skype‘s system once you think about relying on that service (which might be tempting when adoption rate grows). As long as Skype is a proprietary and undisclosed protocol it won‘t be able to penetrate open source markets but it might get hold of a huge market share in general like ICQ did back then.

So if you like to go for a test or wanted to talked to me anyway you can look me up in Skype‘s phone book and give me a call if you like.

The CCC turns 23 and therefore we are going to have a real party at September 11, 2004 at c-base in Berlin. Read the Web Flyer at http://www.ccc.de/23/.

I haven‘t been a big fan of JavaScript in the recent years as it has been mostly used for useless eye-candy that does nothing for the user experience and adds tons of accessibility problems instead. But this is about to change. Taking the outdated and buggy IE aside (which you can, if you want) modern browsers like Safari, Mozilla, Firefox et. al. deliver a stable JavaScript environment these days that conforms to the Document Object Model (DOM) of the W3C well enough to open the door for a new web craft: JavaScript widgets.

There are a couple of good examples on the web but one of the most impressive feat is the redesign of 1976design.com that features „sliding sheets“ and „tabbed“ content.

Gmail is also a good example for this but not everybody has access to it.

We are currently developing a new web-based conference planning software for our upcoming event currently and consider a set of JS widgets as well.

There is a ebuild package of the Blinkenlights Library for Gentoo Linux now.

Advertisement break: my good friend and DJ Sven Dohse (aka Don Shtone) has started his exclusive MP3-Label Shtone Music. So all it‘s music is available online only in non-DRM MP3 files in high quality. You get it at Conzoom.