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.

I spent my first day at What The Hack and I can say the atmosphere is great. Most of the stuff is already set up and our Chaos Village is coming along nicely as well.

The volunteer teams are very effective and they have set up the tents in a very short time. So we already see a small Hack City arise.

No official Internet so far. Just the Orga Network allows outbound communication. However, the DECT phone system is in place for a couple of days already so you can make phone calls all over the field and get called from the outside as well (there is even a flaky outbound gateway but I haven’t tested that yet).

CCC groups are pretty strong at What The Hack. Apart from the POC, our community runs the Wireless Network (WOC), the First Aid Team (CERT) and the Chaos Village of course. The Chaoswelle is present with huge antennas. And André, the art brain behind the Camp’s light decoration, and his team are responsible for the light at What The Hack as well. Last but not least, the conference planning is done with Pentabarf, our new planning software.

Okay, enough bragging for now. I get back on the field taking care of this and that. We are going to lift the roof blanket on our huge dome tent today.

I have been far too busy to blog and had nothing really to say but now the immediate future is clear and there are quite some public activities I can look forward to that I’d like to share with you.

First we’re going to What The Hack, the upcoming open air hacker conference in The Netherlands. We’re about to leave this weekend to have enough time to set up our Chaos Village. We are going to build a pretty nice space so don’t forget to check it out when you are there.

At What The Hack I am going to do a talk on day 2 about Pentabarf, my pet project of the last 12 months. Sven and I are going to present the current state of affairs, where it’s all heading and why we think we should start by rewriting it first. I am sure I am going to reflect on general aspects of conference organization within the hacker scene.