Month: December 2007

I attended the following talks:
– Grundlagen der sicheren Programmierung: okish, but lacked something cool to show off
– Hacking ideologies part 2: most blabla talk of the congress
– Wahlchaos – Paradoxien des deutschen Wahlsystems: nothing really new for me.
– Die Wahrheit und was wirklich passierte: quite interesting insights. The second time this week someone recommends “Freakonomics”
– From Ring Zero to Uid 0: I only attended the first part about Solaris/Sparc and not the part about Windows. quite interesting
– Reverse Engineering Embedded Systems: mentioned some interesting tools, but i missed some more details about toolchain/cross compiling issues.
– Sex 2.0: This was the first talk i attended, that went just totally wrong. The speaker wanted to talk about gay dating communities, but because this is a really special interest topic, he did not mention this in the talk description of the program, but instead just promised insights on “a satisfying sex life”. Of course now the Saal 1 was filled to the last seat. And 99% of the people (all heteros and women) were disappointed when he only talked about gays. Some loudly complained, but the speaker only showed his ignorance. Someone from the audience tried to jump in, but this got even more embarassing. In the end the audience started to clap until the speaker left the stage.
– The day finished with the Hacker Jeopardy. At my last congress 6 years ago, i was very impressed by the mad hacker skillz, but this time it was quite embarassing, when the candidates confused the 8088 with the 80286 and haven’t heard about ~. or “Gödel Escher Bach”. Even fefe seems to be getting old.

I haven’t written anything about yesterday yet. The reason is, the congress sleep deficit is getting larger. Trying to fight it with Club Mate gets harder and harder.
So here my summary about the talks i attended yesterday:
– Elektronische Dokumente und die Zukunft des Lesens: A summary about the current state of ebook readers. The speaker was quite convinced that they are now really start taking off. But i think i will continue reading books for some more years.
– Konzeptionelle Einführung in Erlang: Most confused talk so far. Unfortunately i did not gain much new insights
– After C: D, libd and the Slate project: A perfect example what you will get, when violating the KISS principle.
– Linguistic Hacking: I expected a bit more. Yeah, you can use Google and Wikipedia to learn more about Languages.
– Just in Time compilers – breaking a VM: Peter and Roland presented their talk well.
– Toying with barcodes: As usual great talk by FX
– Spiel, Freude, Eierkuchen?: I only attended the last minutes of the discussion, but it was quite funny watching the heated discussion between the speaker and the audience incl. MdB Tauss.
– Inside the Mac OS X Kernel: Cute girl talking about a cute OS. A bit too much Apple-Fangirlness but still a nice overview.
– DIY Survival: The audience liked the jokes, but i didn’t.
– Rule 34 Contest: They started late because of technical problems, so unfortunately i missed the end, because i thought that i needed to catch last S-Bahn. But actually on weekends there is no last S-Bahn in Berlin. It was the party highlight so far, it will be hard for hackerjeopardy tomorrow to top this. Funny 70s pr0n-Musicals and lots of strange fetishes.

Day 1 started less chaotic. Even the Network worked until about 20:00. I attended several talks.
After the opening the first one about the german Bundestrojaner (not much news for people following fefes Blog). Second one was about the Abuse Handling of the CCC Tor-exitnode.
In the lunchbreak i strolled through the new Alexa-Shoppingmall on the other side of the street.
After lunch the talk about 10GE Sniffing was too crowded, so i recharged my laptop instead and did some maintainance tasks, like fixing some bugs in the squirrelmail configuration (which i only use when i am on a journey, so i did not notice them before) and reconfigured my SSHD to listen on 443, because the internet access in my hotel room only allows port 80 and 443.
I tried to attend the “What is terrorism” talk, but immediately left, because i did not like the way it was presented. I switched to the talk about BT trackersoftware. I don’t and will not use it, but the talk was a good show anyway.
After the evening break i attended the “Crouching Powerpoint, Hidden Trojan” talk. It was about some chinese trojans. What was interesting was how bad the anti-virus products were at detecting quite old only slightly modified trojans and how difficult it is to detect a trojaned machine in the network.
Next was a talk about DNA reverse engineering. I haven’t heard anything about genetics since i left school.
The talk was quite interesting, and i really wonder how many years it will take until there is a genetics programming workshop at a Congress.
Unfortunately the final talk about IPv6 by Jeroen was canceled. So we left for a bar instead.

It’s been six years since i last attended a Chaos Communication Congress. Since last time i had to wait very long at the entrance, i decided to buy my ticket on Day 0 this time.
I arrived a few minutes after 18:00 when the ticket counter should open. Quite a lot of people where already lined up. But the counter did not open, because of a “network issue”. We had to wait for an hour in the cold (approx. 0°C). Then the line was relocated to the inside, and we had to wait another half hour until we were finally able to buy a ticket.
So yeah, i was reminded why it is called “chaos” communication congress. I hope tomorrow will be organized better.