HOME

Just about to view the HOME documentary. HOME jsut came out for the day of environment and was directed and produced by Yann Arthus-Bertrand and Luc Besson, i think it's worth having a look at it.

Stay tuned I will report more about the movie once I've seen it.

Farewell to Fravia

on the 3rd May a brilliant and more than interesting human being left us for ever after having suffered a long illness.

Bye Bye Fravia and thanks for all the brilliant things you leave behind you.

CFP Hack.lu 2009

Finally the CFP for hack.lu 2009 is out.

Call for Papers Hack.lu 2009
============================

The purpose of the hack.lu convention is to give an open and free
playground where people can discuss the implication of new technologies
in society. hack.lu is a balanced mix convention where technical and
non-technical people can meet each other and share freely all kind of
information. The convention will be held in the Grand-Duchy of
Luxembourg in October 2009 (28-30.10.2008). The conference is three days
of active discussions, presentations and workshops for sharing
experience around new attacks, defensive techniques and information
security (including funky experiments). We would like to announce the
opportunity to submit papers, and/or lightning talk proposals for
selection by the hack.lu technical review committee. This year we will
be doing one hour talks, and some shorter talk sessions.


Scope:
------

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Software Engineering and Security
- Honeypots/Honeynets
- Spyware, Phishing and Botnets (Distributed attacks)
- Newly discovered vulnerabilities in software and hardware
- Electronic/Digital Privacy
- Wireless Network and Security
- Attacks on Information Systems and/or Digital Information Storage
- Electronic Voting
- Free Software and Security
- Assessment of Computer, Electronic Devices and Information Systems
- Standards for Information Security
- Legal and Social Aspect of Information Security
- Software Engineering and Security
- Security in Information Retrieval
- Network security
- Forensics and Anti-Forensics
- Mobile communications security and vulnerabilities


Deadlines:
----------

The following dates are important if you want to participate in the CfP

Abstract submission: no later than 15 June 2009
Full paper submission: no later than 1st August 2009
Notification date: mid/end of August


Submission guideline:
---------------------

Authors should submit a paper in English up to 5.000 words, using a
non-proprietary and open electronic format. The program committee will
review all papers and the author of each paper will be notified of the
result, by electronic means. Abstract is up to 400 words. Submissions
must be sent using the following interface: http://2009.hack.lu/papers/

Submissions should also include the following:
1. Presenter, and geographical location (country of origin/passport)and
contact info.
2. Employer and/or affiliations.
3. Brief biography, list of publications or papers.
4. Any significant presentation and/or educational experience/background.
5. Reason why this material is innovative or significant or an important
tutorial.
6. Optionally, any samples of prepared material or outlines ready.
7. Information about if yes or no the submission has already been
presented and where.

The information will be used only for the sole purpose of the hack.lu
convention including the information on the public website. If you want
to remain anonymous, you have the right to use a nickname.


Speakers' Privileges:
---------------------

- Accommodation will be provided (3 nights).
- Travel expenses will be covered up to a max amount.
- Conference speakers night.


Publication and rights:
-----------------------

Authors keep the full rights on their publication/papers but give an
unrestricted right to redistribute their papers for the hack.lu
convention and its related electronic/paper publication.


Sponsoring:
-----------

If you want to support the initiative and gain visibility by sponsoring,
please contact us by writing an e-mail to info(AT)hack.lu


Web site and wiki:
------------------

http://2009.hack.lu/

Using a beamer with Ubuntu

Some weeks ago I was giving a presentation with my Mac and had my Ubuntu laptop to show some demos on it. When I switched the connector of the beamer from my Mac to the Ubuntu machine I had to notice with astonishment that the beamer wouldn't show a damn image. So I had to make the demos with everybody standing in my back and trying to see what's going on.

After the presentation I played around with the beamer and different OSes and the beamer was always working fine exept with Ubuntu.

After having checked the configs and read a little bit about it I found out what to do to make it work.

Just add this little line to your xorg.conf (etc/X11/) file:

sudo vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf

scroll down to the "Device" Section and add

Option "Clone" "true"

save the config file

restart your X server and there you go the screen of the beammer will enlighten.

Cansecwest 09

Cansecwest 09 is over and I am finally back home again fighting with the jetlag.
The 10th Cansecwest, held in Vancouver, as usual, was again one of the best security conference to go to. Although Dragos is trying to get it to an organised conference where everything is starting at its correct time, chaos came back during day 2 where an electricity outage and a delay in the presentations brought Cansecwest back where it always was and what people, who were there the last years so much appreciated with the conference.

Dragos and his team made really a very good job, although they could have tried for making the weather better but maybe putting the conference back to april will help to solve this problem, but then those that like to lengthen the conference with a trip to whistler wouldn't be happy anymore.

So once again thanks again to Dragos and his team for making this happen.

Coming now to the conference itself, day one was mainly focused on how easy or difficult it is to break mobiel devices like iphones, G1s, Blackberries and alike and there were really some very interesting talks about it.

Day two and three were discussing subjects like:

getting keystrokes by analysing eletrical signals froma PC,
how the situation of malware writers is in china,
Persistant BIOS infection and rootkits aso.

There was also the now famous pwn2own contest where interesting prices such as Laptops and money prices up to 10000$ were waiting for the players.
Although nobody hacked the mobile devices the brwoser contest was only a matter of minutes to some ppl until the hacked into them.

Charlie Miller won the contest of the Safari browser hack as he was the first to attempt hacking the Safari browser on Mac OSX and made it directly but there were also two other guys that were successfull in getting into it.

In this context one person (Nils) was hitting all the records as he was able to break into Safari, Firefox and IE8. He was infact the real winner of this context.

Nils, who I had the chance of having a little conversation with, is a german student finishing his masters thesis at the university of Oldenburg. He is hunting bugs for years now and it was not the first time he sold bugs to ZDI in fact he was financing his studies with his capabilities. :-)
He decided to come out this year as once he has finished his studies, he is looking for a job in the business and Cansecwest is definately the best place to get former employers being interested in you. So now he has probably the choice of the job he wants to get and can finish his studies wihtout fear of unemployment. :-)

Nils, I wish you all the best and maybe we will meet each other again later next year. :-)

Daft Punk in some other ways

If you like Daft Punk and if you know how to play with your fingers, just check the following video and try it yourself. :-)

If you are not that good with your fingers but say you are better with a keyboard just check out idaft and have fun.

Wearing the sixth sense

If you don't know the TED website then you definately should take a look at it and especially the videos of the talks given. While visiting TED I just stumbled across the 6th sense talk of Pattie Maes . It's just amazing to see what is done and researched at MIT, in this case the media lab at MIT. Just check out the talk and be amazed what the future will reserve us.

Plug Computing

Today I came across a nice device and I really think that I will order one directly as this device is so kewl that I need to find out what is really possible with it. If this thing wokrs fine and is doing what I think it can then there will be lots of fun ahead with it. Now let's get it and then report back when tested. Stay tuned

Stonegate SG-500

Just came across an old SG-500 appliance. I thought it would be interesting to see what else can run on these boxes, so I opened it and found some interesting things inside. Infact the appliance is nothing more than the Portwell NAD 2050 appliance. Based on a Via chip you have everything on the motherboard you need. You have usb connectors, vga output and a primary and secondary controller so you also can connect a full hdd to it. Unfortunately the board apparently stands a max of 512 mb Ram (SODIMM PC 133s).

The box is ideal to build some kind of server or firewall with DNS aso. by using Debian or alike.

So now I do my best to find some old RAMs to put them in and see what will happen with a 8GB CF card in it.

itunes U

I don't know if you have seen it already bur I discovered in itunes this new section called itunes U. The section has lots of different university lectures on very various themes and it is really interesting to see that all those lectures are for free.

So if you are interested in learning new stuff just feel free to browse through as they are all FREE.

The making of a Panorama

Well yes finally I found the time to follow this link to assemble some panoramas out of my pictures i've taken some time ago. And it worked just great. :-)

Hopefully I will now find the time to put them online. :-)

BT4 on USB stick with persistent changes

As I already had BT3 running on an USB stick I wanted to see how easy it is with BT4.
So I got myself an 8GB Stick and followed the following tutorial. The tutorial is very nice and you should be able to do it very rapidly. I used qtparted to partition my USB stick and I chose to have a 2 GB main partition and the rest for the changes partition.

On the other hand side when I booted BT4 for the first time and started netwroking on my Sony Vaio TX3XP networking was tremendusly slow. So I did changed the few things I mentioned in my last blog when installing Ubuntu and now networking is just a pleasure. :-) and the changes stay persistent of course.

Ubuntu and network issues

Ever installed Ubuntu and your network response went down to practically 0?
Well then welcome to the club.
Installing Ubuntu out of the box and trying to get a nice network connections seems not possible. So here some things you can do to get it to normal speed.
Do the following:

edit /etc/sysctl.conf and add:
net.ipv4.tcp_sack = 0
net.ipv4.tcp_window_scaling = 0

edit /etc/modprobe.d/aliases to remove:
alias net-pf-10 ipv6
and add:
alias net-pf-10 off
alias net-pf-10 off ipv6

if this doesn't help try to comment our everything related to ipv6 in your /etc/hosts file

another thing you could do if the problem is the DNS resolution. Edit your /etc/nsswitch.conf file .

Change the following line:

hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4

into

hosts: files dns mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] mdns

if this doesn't help try the next step and change the line into

hosts: files dns.

These things should help to speed up your network connection again.

Cansecwest 09

Cansecwest I'm coming :-)

Finally I registered for Cansecwest. That will be the 4th time I'll participate and I am already looking forward to it as Dragos is really the perfect conference organiser. :)

So see you in march in Vancouver.

C3L DECT meeting

Hey,

good news. On 16.2 C3L will have two persons from the dedected.org team in their premises in order to have a talk and demo about the DECT issues.

Looking forward to it.

New laptops on the radar

There are really cool things out there in the wild. As i am always looking around for new gear I came by two computers one so called netbook and the other one is a notebook that is really nice.

The netbook is the Sony Vaio P modell which looks to be really a performant and slock netbook although the price is not so cool. Take a look here

The notebook os the IBM Thinkpad x301 with the 128 GB SSD. Also very nice. x301


Well we'll see what the result will be. :-)

Revival

Finally I try to do I revival of my old blog. Hopefully I will have the time to update it regularly. Let's hope.