London-bound

We are finally done packing and as you can see by my list, we're traveling _lite_
2 pairs of shorts
3 shirts
1 pair of pants
4 boxers
3 socks
1 pair of sandals
1 pair of sneakers (a few people convinced me to take these)
+ camera, lonely planet book, Neverwhere, and some toiletries

Here is the itinerary:

London for 2 days
Paris for 4 days
Madrid for 4 days
Barcelona for 2 days
Quick stop in Avignon for 1 night
on the way to Switzerland, Interlaken (pronounce: inter-lockin') for 4 days and Bern for 2
then onto Italy, Cinque Terre (4 days) and Venice (2 days, before it sinks)
a short 1 day in Vienna, Austria (for mozart 250th anniversary)
and then penultimate stop in Prague for 3 days before hoping an easyjet
to London for 1 night and then home on 31 August.

Will write more once we hit London. Bon Voyage!!

Score!

HOPE Day Three

Well it's almost been a full week since the last day of HOPE and i'm just getting around to writing about it.. This will be a quick entry me thinks. Woke up late for a panel by Lady Ada and the TV-B-GONE guy. They talked about the no-contact jacket for women which is a stylish jacket with built-in tasers used to protect against attackers; how to create your own cell phone jammer for cheap (given you have a spectrum analyzer), and of course, tv b gone, which is a wonderful device that everyone should have. Next we need something that turns commercial radio... I only lasted for a minutes in 'Can security detectors be hacked?' due to a boring speaker and some hint of politics. Instead of checked out 'Urban Exploring' given by husband and wife pair who run Long Island Oddities. Covered basic "rules" of exploring abondoned places, some good stories about close calls and great pictures. Next I ditched out early on the computer forensics talk.. too bad for me, it was really good, says bo and josh. i saw some slightly lame talk on encrypting IM traffic. The last two sessions of the day and conference were at complete oposite ends of the spectrum. First was the panel on "social engineering" given by some of the guys from 2600 and chesire catalyst. They took advantage of the current power problems in NYC and attempted to gain information from a local fast food chain. Ends up they don't keep records on premise... Next they attempted to obtain addresses of people who have unlisted addresses in teh phone book by posing as Do-Not-Call employee. The first lady denied us and the second gave her address. And now for something completely different... Jello Biafra did a two hour ranting flamboient keynote mostly on politics. It was really quite boring and lame because he was preaching to the choir and his oratory style tended to wear on you after a while. He also dropped his pants and .... um.... completely exposed all of his body parts that i never wanted to see..

Flickr - H.O.PE. Day Three

Delicious Links

HOPE Day Two

We went to bed around 3am, so we didn't quit make it to the 9am session entitled 'low level firmware analysis and hacking', maybe buy the DVD. We did make it to "Wireless security flaws". Panel of three, did wardriving since 2002, gathering data on what type of wifi networks were available in urban areas. Found a lot insecure networks, most of which broadcast critical information regarding routing, network topo and hardware on unsecured wifi that can be accessed in parking lot. Discussed many different exploits, including spooking machines and inserting your own subnet.

Next topic was phone phreaking 101 - this talk was given by black ratchet from boston. Talked about old phone switching/routing equipment and the new electronic switches that have almost completely replaced the old. Other items of interest were: using operator to mask calls, line recording, CLI (silly) codes (e.g. LYNNMACHDS1= LYNN, Ma, City Hall, Digital Switch1), VOIP carriers, red, blue and black boxes and a handful of urban myths regarding phone phreaking. Also gave out some great phone numbers to call for disaster messages or old recorded messages. See also Old Skool Phreak and YAPL. In the audience was Captian Crunch.

I went to both sessions in A and B next while Bo, Josh and Ryan went lunch. 'Retrocomputing' was boring, talking about really old computer systems and BBS. The other super geeky talk 'in-band vs multiplexed digital radio' was just that... way too geeky for someone who knows almost nothing about radio on a tech level. I meet up with the guys at Popeyes and had some chicken and biscuits and burning hot mashed potatoes.

The keynote of the night was Michael Hart (who is actually talking to some people right next to me now as i type...). He is involved in project gutenburg. I only stayed for a few minutes, Mike was interesting but i wanted to go to 2nd floor to play with stuff there. I played with bump kit and lock picking with the Toool guys. I rode a segway (which was awesome!!) and i played zork on an IBM 5150 and talked with Eliza on a really old system, whose name i forget.

Sam Pocker gave a talk entitled 'Coupon Hacking'. Self explanatory. This talk had a great pre-recorded intro done by a pair of hand puppets, a bear and squirell. Very funny. So was the speaker, 'a short, fat jew from brooklyn'. See his website and radio show, Your Mileage May Vary.

'Password cracking and time-memory tradeoff' was next, basically comparing rainbow tables to full hash tables. Good speaker, impressive web app for cracking md5 passwords.

'Quantum Crypto and Computation' was canceled and replaced by some super boring guy giving a non-techinal talk, I caught the end of the two hour 'Privacy is dead, get over it'.. not that impressed.. And after that was 'hackers in prison' which coincided with the arrest of Steven Rambam. Some of the backround stories were okay but boring after a while.

'Law Enforcement Wiretaps' discussed how wiretaps work, what hardware is involved on the phone companys side and how you can circumvent by sending various tones to block recording, fake out phone numbers, etc etc.

Finally a talk by Robert Steele, an ex CIA covert ops guy. Very boisterous and slightly inflamatory. His main points are: government is idiots, they ignore 80% of the information out there, they need local people for information gathering, open source intelligence. He also likes vodka and women.

Flickr - H.O.P.E. Day Two

HOPE Day One

Saw sessions including "Hackers and Academia", "How to Steal Someone's Implanted RFID", "Mag Stripe Tech. and the MetroCard", "Lockpicking" and a keynote address by Richard Stallman. RFID session was very interesting, with two speaks, a women who had an RFID implant in her arm and her collegue hacker who wrote some custom software and hardware for reading her RFID. Dicussed security of RFID data and how easy it is to steal someone's RFID identity, which is just an unencrypted unique id number. Also discussed current uses of RFID in products, animals and humans. Good talk. Next was Mag Stripe talk given by Joe from 2600/off the hook radio show. Gave an overview of how mag stripes work, implementation of mag stripes (reading and writing) and how he reverse engineered current mag stripes on credit cards, gift cards and MetroCard. Wicked awesome. Then was a 2 hour mammoth talk on lock picking given by Toool, followed by a workshop downstairs where you can get hands on experience picking all sorts of locks using different techniques. Super in depth and really fascinating. Covered an old technique called 'bumping' which is gaining popularity again and which makes 95% of locks on the market vulnerable due to easy application of this picking method. You create a bump key (teeth filed down to 9 position) , put it into lock and bump the key with a hammer or 'tomahawk'. Force causes pins in lock to jump up past split point and at the right time, you turn and you're in! boom! easy. These guys did a lot of demos on the stage, real cool. they also picked another common lock using a paper towel roll and a combo lock using a simple pick. Also talked about legal aspects of lock picking, distribution of tools and bump keys, etc etc. Finally, keynote by RMS. This was super boring because he told me everything i already knew in a monotone voice. Q & A session was lame because all of his answers where either "i don't understand" or "that's a hypothetical situation, so i'm not going to answer your question". A lot of people kissed his ass. He is a christ figure. lame.

Flickr - H.O.P.E. Day One

Pre-New York

Well that was a short break.. after a few hours of sleep, we are up and preparing to leave for New York, trying to get there by 11am for "Hackers and Academia".

Bye Bye Bentley

This past Monday I gave my notice at work.. Lack of _really_ challenging work, underpaid + corporate headaches lead to this decision. Now it's time for caitlin and I to travel. After much flip-flopping between Thailand and Europe and many emails from friends voting for their fav, we have decided on Europe.. Thailand looks so incredible, budha, golden temples, completely different religion and way of thinking and a lot of ppl say it's easy to travel... but malaria and other disease and some turmoil in certain areas + no time to prepare at all, (e.g. get vaccines, or figure where not to travel) plus the fact that europe is sooo easy to travel and has soo much variety.. well you can see why we choose it. Thailand will be next year.

But for now, i leave in 5 hours for NYC to attend Hope Number Six. This is a hacker conference and no, i will not be breaking laws. Just learning knowledge that people don't want you to know.. I'm going with some fellow prog'ers from work.. They all own the new Nintendo DS Lite. This caused me to purchase one, as not to be left out of the crowd. Playing Animal Crossing now. Pretty cool device, built-in wifi, play games against other ppl next to you or on the internets, cool chat application and of course great nintendo games.