Archive for December, 2005

22c3 day 3 random notes

Friday, December 30th, 2005

my personal highlight for this day was Changing Realities - a live demonstration of secondlife.com - a complete online 3d virtual world that has 100.000 inhabitants by now. the speaker emphasized that secondlife is not intended as an online game but as a working environment. he compared it to the metaverse from the book snowcrash by neal stephenson (which anyone interested in extremely well written science fiction / societey in 50 years should read, right after ‘the diamond age’ and ‘cryptonomicon’ of course).

the idea is that secondlife (2L) only provides a basic simulated world and users do whatever they want in it by creating and uploading their own objects. for example, one user has created a fully functional piano that can be used within 2L to play concerts or compose music. another has built a music club including turntables to have parties. also, there is an art club, where users meet in some room in a 2L building. the participants draw a 2L avatar that is standing in the virtual room using real pen and paper and then scan and upload what they have drawn into 2L to be able to discuss their creations online.

by the way my 2L (second life) name is Loard Nabob (you have to choose your last name from a list) - i’m standing around at the tutorial section. they have clients for mac and windows, linux is coming. basic accounts are free.

unfortunately this was my last day at 22c3 as i left for some days of snowboarding the same evening. for anyone who’s interested all talks have been video recorded and should be available soon for download at events.ccc.de

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spare ccc keychain strap

Friday, December 30th, 2005

i have a spare keychain strap of the 22c3 (you get one whenever you buy one of the 25 eur day passes). it’s black and the movable parts are made of metal instead of plastic, so it’s high quality :)

on the strap it states ‘kabelsalat ist gesund’. the first person to post a comment to this entry can have it.

(now people can finally win stuff on my blog, too .. maybe this attracts more readers or something)

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22c3 day 2 random notes

Friday, December 30th, 2005

this day i only attended remotely via video streams as i had work to do. (to my surprise i still could work productively while listening)

Search Engines - Oracles of the Information Society was partly funny when some assistant of a professor giving the main part of the talk demonstrated some nice playing with google. he had searched for words that usually appear on the pages of a phpmyadmin installation. this showed him a whole bunch of unprotected (!) phpmyadmin sites which allowed him to view and edit various databases, for example that of some online shop, including email addresses and passwords of the customers. he then tried to log into yahoo with a customer’s yahoo email address using the same password as in the shop - of course it worked…

Old Skewl Hacking - InfraRed updated was about - surprise - hacking infrared devices. it began with more simple stuff like unlocking cars and garage doors, but the main part was about hacking the tv sets of various hotel rooms. apart from being able to watch pay tv channels for free the guy managed to influence the mini bar billing system for his room. he then gained access to the room information for the entire hotel and could change their tv channels and also automatic wakeup services. some people woke up really early the next day. the highlight then was that he had suddenly gotten a 404 error html page on his tv set which sent him to the home page of the internal hotel management web server. in the end he had a windows nt 4 server desktop on his tv with administrator privileges and could control the entire hotel infrastructure - pretty scary…. (and great fun, too :) )

Have you hugged your Mac today? was a live play about the history of apple. the highlight there was when they showed this movie, a parody on a legendary 1984 apple commercial.

watching all those presentations from my home sofa was pretty cool, though we had some problems with connection stability from time to time. anyway, really being there is still better, so for day 3 i made my way to the congress center again.

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random notes from 22c3 day 1

Tuesday, December 27th, 2005

word of the day, though invented by a nervous speaker probably on accident, is: automagically

most presentation were far too brief - no “insider hacker secrets” to be heard.

the best was hacking data retention given by Brenno de Winter from the Netherlands, who talked about how totally senseless the upcoming EU wide data retention laws are. he recommends to set up our own email and communication servers and to use SILC.

hopalong casualty gave a basic introduction about video image processing without touching deeper grounds.

message generation at the info layer was pretty much pointless since the topic was not clear even after the talk had been given.

media system deployment using python looked interesting (and probably was) but i spent most of the talk coding ruby for a python contest. a big plus was the almost perfect english of the speaker.

writing better code (in dylan) sounded promising, but the presentation was just done too badly (complex examples, too little explained). i installed dylan anyway (it’s in fink), maybe it’s my next language to learn.

i had a lot of pain fun listening to the german accents of the speakers. i would have expected more presentation of in-depth knowledge. i’ll probably stick to the talks given by foreign speakers.

the blinken lights experiments set up in the lounge on the base floor are pretty cool, you can play with them via phone.

i also liked the pong 3d game (next to blinken lights). essentially a 3d cubic array of red LEDs that display the paddles/ball and can be controlled using joysticks.

what are all these people sitting on the floor doing with their laptops all the time?

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angelina merkel

Saturday, December 24th, 2005

angelina merkel

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loesje

Friday, December 23rd, 2005









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vote for chris christmas rodriguez

Friday, December 9th, 2005

vote for chris christmas rodriguez to replace santa this year - hilariuos: http://www.wiggerl.com/ccr/

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Zeit Podcast follow up

Friday, December 9th, 2005

How cool is that? Today i got an email from the actual webmaster of the zeit.de web site. he likes my Zeit podcast tool mentioned in an earlier post. looks like we are going to get an official Zeit podcast soon.

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