Old Man Time

BrumCon time again. Another year has passed. I've learnt a great deal of tech stuff, but it feels pathetic. I'm still looking at a far mountain, unsure of how I can even start to move towards it.

Woke at 4:30 am. Met Richard at the station. 4 hours from Norwich to Birmingham. I finished off my presentation on the train and read up on my subject.

We met PHM and Bal at the hotel. Bal is an old friend, PHM is a fellow SDFer.

My talk was scheduled for 2 pm, before a break so I could overrun a bit. The room was the same one as last year, and it got hot as it started to fill up.

The first talk was "IPv "what?": yeah what !!!" by Zipser. Zipser usually talks about remote telemetry systems so it was a bit strange hearing him talk about TCP/IP. The talk consisted of an overview of IPv6 packet structure, and little else.

My talk, "What's On The Cards: Security Issues Surrounding Card-based Authentication" went quite well. Everyone got the jokes, and the video I showed about ID cards went down very well.

There was a very short talk called "Mobile Java programming: For fun, profit and voyeurism" by LSL. It lacked any real content.

"All Your Email Belong To Us: The meat and guts" described SMTP email headers. Nothing more.

"Your Games 0wn U: Please Update Me." pointed out that online games contain spyware and automatically install updates...

Sneaky Russian gave an eye-opening talk called "UPnP NAT Manipulation: Yeah that's (U)n(P)rotected (N)etwork (P)hun" all about the UPnP standard for remotely configuring low-end network devices. The content was good, but by this point I was passing in and out of consciousness due to the heat and the fact that I had been up since 4 am.

The hacker panel was a bit disappointing as the audience were too tired to come up with many questions. Still, I'm glad we had a panel as it was my idea.

After BrumCon I went to China-town for dinner with Bal, Richard, Lionfish, PHM and a mystery hacker. We ate at a cafe I used to go to years ago called Cafe Soya. The food was first class and reasonably priced.