The Long Walk To Boredom

Had breakfast at 9 am. Packed up my stuff and said goodbye to the staff of the pension. Walked to Alexanderplatz for the last time.

Richard and I killed some time in Dunkin' Doughnuts. We watched an episode of InDigital that I had downloaded while packing. It wasn't very good but it occupied some time.

Arriving at Berlin Schoenefeld airport, we were greeted by a Scottish man asking for our train tickets in order to sell them and buy drugs with the money. My ticket was of no use to him, but he eagerly took Richard's one-day pass.

On the plane I finished reading "Code: The Hidden Language Of Computer Hardware And Software" by Charles Petzold. I need to read it again soon. The flight was uneventful, despite bad weather. Landed at Gatwick after being airbourne for around 2 hours. Arriving in Gatwick airport is like US Foreign Policy: it makes me want to kill myself and others.

Got a lift home. Slept for some of the 2-hour journey.

When I got home I held my cat very tightly. I listened to Cambodian psychedelic rock music and drank Pepsi Max (maximum taste, no sugar; carbonated beverage of hacker generation X). I stared at my computer books, and my future.

Photography And Pornography

I slept most of the morning and early afternoon.

In the evening I took a train to Berlin's famous Zoo station. The place Richard had arranged to meet me turned out to be some kind of needle exchange. Nice.

We went to a photo gallery that Richard had spotted a few days before. As it was a Thursday and as it was after 6:30 pm, entrance to the gallery was free. The collections consisted largely of porn. There were some war photos as well. I watched part of a video of a photo shoot involving Courtney Love. Being reminded that Courtney Love existed was an unpleasant experience but it wasn't as bad as it had been in my dreams and nightmares. The gallery was full of young people, probably because it was free. It's always good to find where the young people in a city hang out. I like young people very much, but they tend to make me sick sometimes.

Richard wanted to go to a vegetarian Indian restaurant that he had found in a guide book. Amazingly, we found the restaurant, and it was very good. We went to Ben And Jerry's afterwards for ice cream.

Checkpoint Charlie

Richard and I went to the Checkpoint Charlie museum. It was expensive and strange. The museum was opened in a house, a couple of years after the Berlin Wall was built. It consists of a series of small rooms linked by narrow passages and filled with random crap. About half the stuff in the museum is art, the remaining exhibits are various escape devices such as cars with hidden compartments, suitcases which people hid in and even a huge hot air balloon that two families used to escape over the wall.

After looking around the museum we met up with my friend Keiko. Walked around looking for food. We eventually found the place I had gone to with Mitch. We ate falafel and pizza. Keiko ate cake. Greedy Keiko. I noticed a Mafia guy sitting at a table when we arrived. After about 40 minutes, he started talking to the staff about something. It seemed like things were going to get nasty. After a while he left. The owners of the cafe made a series of phone calls and a couple of tough-looking guys arrived. We decided to leave.

In the evening I met up with Mitch and Peter for dinner. We went to an Indian restaurant again. This one was much better than the one we had previously been to, both in terms of the food and of the service. It was sad to be seeing Mitch and Peter for the last time in quite a while, I've really enjoyed spending time with them and hearing about their various adventures in Silicon Valley before and during the Dot Com era. Mitch invited me to San Francisco to hang out with him sometime. I'll definitely take him up on the offer.

Mitch Altman

I got to know Mitch a little in New York City last year while attending the HOPE conference. I actually met Mitch before the conference at New York radio station WBAI, where we were both waiting to go on the show Off The Hook. I got on well with Mitch from the beginning, and we talked quite a bit at HOPE. Hanging out with him in Berlin has been a really great experience and just goes to show that life can be good sometimes:)

(Photo by Jacob Appelbaum)

Bursting The Bubble

Woke up at 7:45 for breakfast. The blister on my foot has got much bigger, it's now about 5 cm long and 3 cm wide. I spent some time trying to cut the blister open with a pair of nail clippers, it was impossible so in the end I used a spike on my Swiss Army knife. Fuck. Lots of liquid, lots of pain and a few laughs later, my foot looked a bit better. I went to bed again afterwards and slept for a few hours.

My mobile is out of credit, despite the fact that I've only send a few (6-10) texts and made 2 calls, each of less than a minute. Some googling of the Vodafone website reveals that I'm probably being charged to receive calls and SMS messages. Fucking Vodafone.

Met up with Richard. He has been feeling unwell, probably due to drinking too much coffee. We had dinner in an Italian restaurant near Alexanderplatz. Good food at reasonable prices, the only problem was the smoke. One must get used to such things in Germany.

Television, The Drug Of The Nation

I can't help noticing it's the first day of 2007. (Note: This is a lie. Every fucking day is the same. Really.)
Richard and I met up with Mitch Altman, inventor of TV-B-Gone and his friend Peter, who helps run the TV-B-Gone business. We met at the world clock in Alexanderplatz and then took an underground train in search of food. We ended up having dinner at an Indian restaurant. The staff were very impolite but the food was ok. Peter told us many tales of impolite staff in Germany.

Peter and Mitch took us to a Ben And Jerry's ice cream parlour. I had ice cream like I've never tasted before. I didn't know anything about Ben And Jerry's, an ice cream company started in 1978 and now owned by the delightful people at Unilever. I now know a little more than nothing, which is probably as much knowledge as I need on the subject.

Mitch turned off the TV in the corner of the ice cream parlor when we arrived. He and Peter have turned off the TV several times there over the past few days. We talked about the conference, the success of TV-B-Gone, the hacker ethic and many other topics. We were joined by a friend of Peter's from Hungary. Conversation turned to Russian literature and the works of Stanislaw Lem, a Polish writer who died last year. Before leaving Ben And Jerry's, Mitch turned off the TV again.

Mitch, Richard and I walked to Alexanderplatz. Richard felt ill so he went back to his hostel. Mitch and I went up the famous Fernsehturm (Television tower) You can read about the tower here. We discussed possible variations on TV-B-Gone such as using a laser diode instead of an LED. We also talked about Mitch's next product, an electronic relaxation device. Mitch is going to have an article about the device published in the next issue of Make magazine. I'm very much looking forward to it.

Mitch and I went for an extremely long walk, choosing whichever direction felt best. At around midnight we found a Turkish bar/cafe which had an awesome mezzanine floor and a palm tree. We ate falafel and observed young Turks running free.

The Eve Of Destruction

It's New Year's Eve, 2006. Do you know who's in your boxen?

In an incredible break from tradition, I actually received an invitation to a social occasion! The invitation was to spend New Year's Eve with Sebastian, a German computer science student who Richard and I had met at the 23C3. Richard was not keen on the idea because he had his heart set on seeing the fireworks at the Brandenburg Gate, not sitting inside with a bunch of geeks. Also, as Sebastian observed shortly after meeting Richard his "life follows a sad pattern". I persuaded Richard that we should go to Sebastian's apartment, assuming he would leave at some point to go to the Brandenburg Gate. Sebastian's apartment was wonderful. The interior was very modern and it was quite spacious. I was surprised when he told us how low the rent was. It made me think about the standard of living here in Berlin compared to that in Rip-Off Britain, and how much I hate the UK.

Sebastian's brother and some of his friends came over. Everyone was friendly and interesting. And clever. Guess which one is most important to me:)

Somebody cooked great pizza at some point. Richard and the others drank B52's, a three-layer cocktail consisting of Bailey's, Grand Marnier and Kahlua. For reasons that were never made clear, it was decided that the drinks should be set on fire and then drunk through a straw. This proved to be quite a dangerous course of action as the straws caught fire and molten plastic dripped everywhere.

Throughout the night I spent quite a bit of time playing Street Fighter 2 on MAME. I've always considered SF2 to be a console game as most of my friends played it on the SNES. I felt it was very inferior to Final Fight, a side scrolling beat 'em up that Dr Edward Bearskin and I used to play for hours on end. I was never into console games as a teenager, being an owner of an Amiga.(A REAL computer) It was still good to see the game and all the characters I had forgotten: Guile, Chun-Li, Dhalsim, Ken, Ryu, Blanka etc.

It was somehow decided that we should all go to the Brandenburg Gate for the countdown to midnight. We traveled by bus and arrived to find what appeared to be a small war. Fireworks were being set off in the street and were flying around just a few feet from people's heads. The ground was covered with broken glass. At midnight champagne and wine glasses were produced. Despite some minor peer pressure from Richard, I didn't drink any.

When we got back to Sebastian's apartment we ate more pizza and discussed various issues relating to cryptography, steganography and anonymity for many, many hours. Eventually it was past 4 am and time to go home. All in all, probably the best New Year's Eve I've ever had.

CCC: Day 4 Of The 23C3

The last day of the 23rd Chaos Computer Congress.
I walked into the second half of a talk on unusual security bugs. From what I could gather it was mostly ANSI C Standard stuff and poor coding practices. Towards the end of the talk I fell asleep. This wouldn't have been a problem except that I had forgotten to turn off my mobile, and I received a call from Richard. Mobiles are dumb.

Podjournalism
This talk on podcasting started out poorly, largely because it was not funny enough, despite a dumb girl in the front row laughing continuously, presumably she was a friend/enemy of the speaker. It improved a lot towards the end. A Frenchman was involved.

TV-B-Gone
I missed Mitch Altman's talk about his invention TV-Be-Gone at HOPE this year, so it was good to have a chance to see it at the CCC. TV-B-Gone is a simple device but Mitch's talk was mainly about the role television played in his childhood and about how this had led him to building a device for turning off TV's. Great stuff.

While checking me email, I spotted what appeared to be a Japanese hacker. I asked her to sit down so I could question her. She obliged, so we sat down and discussed various topics related to Japan, Web 2.0 and technology in general. Although she wasn't really a hacker, Fumi Yamazaki was very cool. She works for Technorati, a blog search engine. Fumi said it would be ok to interview her sometime using Skype, I'll try to get it done next month sometime.

Culture Jamming & Discordianism
Fumi and I watched this rather weak talk given by Autumn Tyr-Salvia, an American girl. It had all be said before, and in far more eloquent ways.


The 23 Chaos Computer Congress Closing Ceremony
The 23C3 has passed more quickly than any conference I have attended in the past. Tim Pritlove reviewed the congress and shared some insights into various things that had gone on. Lots of people were thanked. Photos were taken. Sadness mixed with pride. I said goodbye to Fumi and I resolved to return to Japan next year, even if it's just for a couple of months. Many of us here will be getting together in the summer next year for a hacker camp, and of course it's only 12 months until the next mother-fucking Chaos Communication Congress.

During this last day of the 23C3 I grew older in a short space of time. When I draw my final breath on this vile planet will I say "Shit, I thought we'd only just got started..."

CCC: Day 3 Of The 23C3

Got to the CCC at 10:30 am, I would have preferred to stay in bed for another couple of hours, but I wanted to watch Jacob Appelbaum's talk, which was in the first session of the day.

Unlocking FileVault
A talk on security of Apple FileVault, an encryption system built into Mac OS X. Like many good hacker talks, it started with a song. Jacob Appelbaum and Ralf-Philipp Weinmann then discussed their investigation into FileVault security and a tool they had built. Special guest Hikari (David Hulton) then demonstrated a high speed password cracking method using an FPGA on a Compact Flash card.

Fuzzing In The Corporate World
Talk on the use of fuzzing in software testing by an Israli security consultant. He began his talk by asking the audience how many of them had sold out and were now working for big corporations. He was quite embarrassed when nobody put their hand up. European hackers don't sell out as easily as hackers in the US and other countries do. The talk was basic but so is my knowledge of fuzzing, so things worked out well. I was sitting at the back of the room and couldn't really see the speaker. There was, however, a good wireless signal so I was able to watch the speaker on my laptop using the IP streaming that had been set up.

Nintendo DS
This was a nice talk on reverse engineering the Nintendo DS handheld games console. I don't like games consoles, but reverse engineering interests me greatly. A good talk overall, although my low opinion of consoles still stands.

"An Introduction To Traffic Analysis"
Most of the examples in the beginning of the talk were covert channel attacks, not traffic analysis. The speaker tried to emphasise the importance of traffic analyis but didn't have any strong examples in his talk. Afterwards, someone asked for a concrete example and the speaker showed a map of Indymedia nodes. From the map a list of the top 100 nodes was made. Killing the top 100 nodes would probably destroy Indymedia.

"Security In Cardholder Data Processing"
This talk didn't contain any information on credit cards, instead it detailed standard security auditing of companies which run credit card systems. I found it to be both interesting and useful, although the delivery was poor.

"On Free, And The Differences Between Culture And Code"
A silly American saying a lot of silly stuff about copyright. The presentation was well done, but ultimately, the guy had nothing to say. Talks like this bring out the worst in the hacker community. Speakers know that if they talk about free software, open source, hackers being clever etc., they will get a good response. Stupid people talking to stupid people.

"Automated Exploit Detection In Binaries"
Luis Miras gave this presentation on a software project of his which uses automated reverse engineering techniques to look through compiled programs and find possible buffer overflows in them. Even with my limited knowledge of C and assembly, I was still able to follow it without difficulty. The software is designed to be multi-platform and therefore uses a virtual machine. Simply coding the VM itself is a difficult task, so the whole project is a serious undertaking. For reasons that weren't made clear, the code was being written in Objective C.

CCC: Day 2 Of The 23C3

Slept for a few hours and then was woken by the voice of a girl telling me that breakfast was ready. I intended to get some work done while eating, but it was not to be.

Sleep deprivation has impaired my ability to think coherently, I sat at the breakfast table with my notepad, failing to write anything of value. The food in my hostel is really good and eating breakfast is already having a positive effect on me. In 2007 I'll aim to eat breakfast more often...


Annoyingly I didn't arrive at the CCC in time for the talk on infrastructure hacking. It discussed weaknesses in backbone routing protocols and sounded very interesting. Yesterday I met Raven, the woman who was giving the talk. She said she had been investigating insecurities in routing protocols in the US and had found some massive security holes. She contacted the Internet Service Providers concerned and got some pretty stupid responses including "Please don't publicise that weak password you found because we're not going to change it". All talks at the CCC will be available for download at some point in the near future, so I'll download it then.

"Detecting Temperature Through Clock Skew"
This talk was on identifying computers remotely across a network by using a side channel attack. It was given by a Scottish(?) guy called Steven J. Murdoch who works at the Cambridge University computer lab. He was an excellent speaker, and that talk was full of deep hacker magic. The basic idea is that the various clocks used in computers tend to drift due to the temperature inside the computer case. This drifting(clock skew) can be measured using TCP timestamps and is unique enough to be useful as a fingerprint for the specific make, model and even individual PC.

"Tor And China"
This talk was mainly about Tor, an Electronic Frontier Foundation project for anonymous communication which uses a series of tunnels. It was all quite silly. I'm starting to think that the EFF are fighting battles which have already been lost and that they lack understanding the big picture. The talk began with a series of very questionable assumptions upon which Tor is based. People think Tor is important because it is fun and it sounds cool. Currently, for whatever reasons, the people involved with developing it are not people with a good understanding of the nature of the world or the nature of security. This may change in the future, but it's likely that Tor is fundamentally broken, and unless the project is seen as nothing more than a way to learn about some interesting topics, its value is limited.

Quick break for food and coffee, followed by talk on RFID:

"A Hacker's Toolkit For RFID"
The talk covered RFID jamming and spoofing as well as auditing RFID systems. The speaker was a young American woman, and she was quite good, all things considered. One of the problems she suffered from was common to many hackers: she talked about how to make bad stuff slightly better instead of talking about how to destroy the bad stuff. This is wrong.

The Apple Powerbook's crap wireless is really starting to piss me off. Everyone around me seems to be using the wifi here with ease, but due to the crummy Apple wifi card and the poor built-in aerial, I get nothing.

"RFID Hacking"
Another talk on RFID, this one given in three parts by three different people, Karsten Nohl, z0ccor and Henry Plotz. The first part was about making a fake ticket for a World Cup game. It wasn't very detailed but was still interesting. One of the most interesting things was a photo of a ticket that had been placed in a microwave for 2 seconds. You could see the charred paper around aerial and battery of the RFID tag. This suggests that although microwave ovens can be used to destroy RFID tags, it's not a useful method if you then had to present a document containing the tag at a checkpoint etc. Part two covered privacy issues with RFID. The concept presented was that tracking people by RFID is easier than one would imagine. This is a very important point, because most previous studies had always assumed the person would have a single tag. In fact, over the next few years most new clothing will be tagged, so it won't be unusual for people to be wearing 6-10 tags. Part 3 gave a practical blueprint of how to reverse engineer an RFID card system. The speaker lived in university accommodation which used RFID cards as keys. He was able to successfully spoof the key to his room using an Ipod and a homemade transmitter. He went step-by-step through the whole process, using tools such as GNUradio and USRP.

"Stealth Malware"
This talk covered rootkits, trojans, viruses, worms and other nice things. It was given by Joanna Rutkowska. At the first CCC I went to(21C3) I saw her give a talk on passive covert channels in Linux. Although is was basic, and she had got a few things wrong, the talk was still very good and it got me very interested in the stegonographic use of TCP/IP. Her talk on malware was interesting, but nothing special. A bit like Rutowska herself.

"Homegrown Interactive Tables"
This talk was in German, but was still very cool. It was given by a team who built their own version of Multitouch, a giant touch screen which can recognise multiple points instead of just a single point. The touch screen they built is in the lounge area of the CCC, I played around with it a bit and thought it had a lot of potential. I'm going to look into building one.

Black Ops of TCP/IP
Although Dan Kaminsky is selling more of his soul each day, his talks are still very interesting and very entertaining. This year his talk covered graphical tools for analysing bineries, various SSH issues and fuzzing. Kaminsky's style is great, and he has a knack for looking at old tech in new and interesting ways.

CCC: Day 1 Of The 23C3

A very poor keynote speaker from the EFF. He claimed that hackers are a serious threat to the public and must be dealt with by the hacker community. He talked about hackers working for mafia in eastern Europe etc. Very lame.

The Grim Meathook Future
I was planning to go to a talk on a CCC RFID project, but the room was completely packed so Richard and I ended up in a talk called the Grim Meathook Future. It was a complete surprise to find that the speaker was eloquent, funny and had some very serious stuff to say. The talk focussed on false assumptions made about the future summed up by the phrase "In the future everything will work". This is the reason I come to hacker cons, not the tech stuff, but the few talks which hit very hard, and tell you things that you knew were true but that you don't allow to affect the way you live your life. I didn't agree with much of what he said, but the general thrust of the first part of the talk was that many hackers are in love with their toys and run around telling everyone how such tools will change the world.

Privacy In Web 2.0
Web 2.0 is a bunch of crap. This fact should be reflected on deeply. Regardless of this, I still attended the talk. Although I've often said that the European hacker scene is more advanced than that of the US, one of the negative aspects of the advanced nature of the hacker scene here is that people here seem to talk more about things in a theoretical and abstract way.

Drones
Got stuck in a talk in German. Fortunately the talk contained some videos, some pictures and a demonstration. Although I couldn't understand what was being said, it seemed to me that a lot of it was just talk about toy helicopters with mounted cameras and video senders. Certainly not drones, but still quite cool.

We Don't Trust Voting Computers
I have no interest in voting and voting computers. I attended this 2-hour talk simply because the speaker rocks. The speaker, Rop Gonggrijp, headed a campaign against voting computers in The Netherlands. Being 31337 haxors, Rop and his team were able to obtain some voting computers, find some insecurities in them and publicise them widely.

Riding On The Rocket

Arriving at the Berliner Conference Centre and seeing The Heart Of Gold, the Chaos Computer Club's rocket affected me more than I could have imagined. It means that, at least for the next few days, I have a chance at living my life in a better, deeper way.

Boxing Day In Berlin

Slept for the whole of the flight. Got from the airport to Alexanderplatz without difficulty. Found my hostel. Waited an hour for a member of staff to turn up. My room is clean and warm but there's little else to say about it. Slept for a couple of hours then walked back to Alexanderplatz.

Arriving at the Chaos Communication Congress feels wonderful. It's 19:46, there are already a couple of hundred people milling around, sitting on the many sofas, setting up projects, infrastructure and generally making magic.

Ate some pizza and soaked up the atmosphere of the lounge area. There are lots of projects set up around the lounge, and there's a dj as well, so it's a good place to spend time.

Queued for an hour at registration, somehow 500+ people had arrived without me noticing. The CCC is using wrist bands this year instead of the usual lanyards. Also, we weren't given a programme. Change is inevitable.

Met Glen, a guy I had met at What The Hack in The Netherlands last year. He always gets involved in running hacker cons, which seems to be a very sensible thing to do.

Richard arrived. We wondered around a bit, then went to our hostels, Richard using the train, myself on foot.