22c3 day 2 random notes
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.
Tags:22c3 apple ccc hacking infrared video