21st Chaos Communication Congress: Day 3

Did not confuse timetables again and arrived on time for Christian’s Voice over IP talk.

Had a foot long subway sandwich as brunch with Melanie right in front of the tv tower.

Returned to the congress hall to listen to Dan Kaminsky’s second talk: MD5 considered to be harmful.
Went with Scotty to Angelo’s MacOSX practical insecurities talk and watched gleefully how he disclosed lots of security vulnerabilities and *gasp* a first mac osx worm that is able to replicate.

Listened to even more talks (Harald Welte’s NAT talk, Old Skewl Hacking: Infra Red and the entertaining review and preview “Security Nightmares 2005“) and stayed at the Congress Center till the end.

Bumped into Tim who was dissassembling the network and chatted a bit about the general network conditions. Setting up a high-demand network for 3500 people is a challenging and quite interesting job - I suppose - especially if you get equippment that is flawed, like switches with no firmware.

Decided to drive home to change and grab something to eat. Found a thai place at the Alexanderplatz (surprisingly with really nice food) that did takeaway and took the tram back home. Got really sleepy and could not persuade myself to drive back to the cbase party, so did an early night and went straight to bed.

Overall the Congress was great. There were some really excellent talks and quite a few entertaining speakers. If you are able to cope with some chaotic conditions, you should definitely attend.

21st Chaos Communication Congress: Day 2

Confused time tables and had to wait 15 minutes for the right tram and still managed to get onto the wrong tram. Therefore I missed part of the pgp standard talk. Ran into Mario, and really enjoyed the passive covert channel lecture of Joanna Rutkowska for various reasons.

Tried to connect to the net again and synced 5000 mails which took an hour. Unfortunately I missed the first part of the bluetooh hacking talk which brought some amazing results.

Went to an Italian restaurant for pizza and restocked food supply for the congress in the food section of kaufhof.

Attended the keysigning party which was supposed to last for an hour. When I arrived with Scotty there were around 150 people in the workshop room - which was clearly too much. We started to compare fingerprints and decided to do the id comparison at a different location. At first we wanted to do that on the platform of the trainstation but this idea was rejected by some people because the platform had surveillance cameras. We gathered in front of the congress center and it took a while until everyone found their position. The whole event lasted for 2,5 hours and lots of people (including me) were half-frozzen and cursed for not taking any gloves. Overall it was fun nevertheless.

Returned to catch the rest of Dan Kaminsky’s talk “Black Ops of dns”. Amazing stuff and Dan is a really entertaining speaker.

Listened to more talks during the night and even stayed for the Hacker’s jeopardy till 2am.

Managed to miss the night bus, although I was literally standing right in front of it. Normally I am better with the local public transportation system… Had a vague idea where I needed to go, so decided to walk home. Walked right into the Oranienburger Straße where lots of ladies tried to be really, really helpful and would have probably offered a place to stay but with only 10 Euros left, I figured that I should politely decline any offers.

Walking along the Oranienburger Straße at 3am in the morning has also the big advantage that lots of police is still around.

Found a place that still had kebabs and eventually arrived at home around 4am.

21st Chaos Communication Congress: Day 1

Long queue to get inside, lot’s of people inside and chaotic network conditions. But, hey, that ’s pretty normal I later learnt. Went to some legal talks during the afternoon and tried to synchronize my email - without success. WLAN is simply not useful for that many people and there were not enough network ports.

Went to the lockpicking room in the evening and watched a video that explained in detail how to overcome different locks and security devices. Eventually signs of passive inhaling occured and I went to the phishing talk which was held by mario manno.

Met with Christian and Melanie later on, ate a burger and went to an Irish pub at the Hackescher Markt which I had discovered during the morning. Amazingly, this pub had also wireless access, so, sure enough, geeks were sitting around with laptops - not even at a pub you are safe nowadays. We left shortly before midnight and I tried to be helpful to get Christian and Melanie on the right train. Figured out, that trains were not running straight to the Potsdamer Platz and decided to take a scenic walk. Managed to miss the night bus by seconds and convinced Christian and Melanie to walk along the Strasse unter den Linden to the Brandenburg Gate. We parted at the Friedrichstrasse and I hurried to get home. 3 pints of Cider caused an urgent need which was not easy to fulfill. If you are in desperate need of a public toilet, they are all closed. Eventually found a shaddy toilet - not a second too late.
Fell straight into bed at 1am.

Christmas…

was spent with my dad and his family in Berlin. We also drove to Thuringia to celebrate my grandmas 86th birthday and took her back to Berlin so that we could spend Christmas with her, too. I was sort of a birthday surprise, because she did not expect me to come and we had not seen each other for a very long time.

My grandpa got a heart condition a couple of days before christmas but luckily they let him out for christmas. 2004 has really been a terrible year in regards to health issues. I just hope that 2005 turns out better.

Overall, I had some relaxing days with lots of food and even managed to get two christmas lunches.

remote dialin via mobile phone

Since there is a pretty good chance, that my change of phone companies will occur while I am away, I’ve setup a remote dialin via my mobile phone.

Small HowTo (based on: Peter Bieringer’s isdn dialin howto):

Serverside

server: Debian Sarge Linux
hardware: AVM ISDN Fritz PCI card
software: mgetty package, working isdn environment (2.6.9 with fritz_pci module)

/etc/mgetty/mgetty.config
# Login over ISDN & V.110 (GSM)
port ttyI1
init-chat “” ddd+++dddATZ OK AT&E&R9600S19=0 OK
modem-type data

/etc/mgetty/login.config
replace this line:
/AutoPPP/ - a_ppp /usr/sbin/pppd auth -chap +pap login debug
with:
/AutoPPP/ - a_ppp /usr/sbin/pppd file /etc/ppp/handydialin

/etc/inittab:
T0:23:respawn:/sbin/mgetty -x 9 -s 9600 ttyI9

(don’t forget to restart with init q!)

/etc/ppp/handydialin:
auth
+chap
-pap
debug
name dialin
#kdebug 5
ms-dns 192.168.1.1
ms-wins 192.168.1.1
192.168.1.1:

/etc/ppp/chap-secrets:
joe dialin “password” 192.168.1.5

Clientside

client: Windows XP Pro
hardware: Sony Ericsson
software: default installation will do

Go to the device manager, and click on the properties of your modem.
Go to the Advanced tab and enter AT+CBST=71,0,1 in the initialization command field.

Create a new connection, enter the configured msn as destination and enter the username and password that you’ve used in chap-secrets (joe/password). Go to the network tab, click on the PPP properties button and select only the first item. (You can activate software compression later on, if everything else works.)

Start the connection, the mobile phone should dial and negotiate everything. That’s it.
In case something did not work, syslog should provide enough clues.

The technical side of christmas

I am cleaning up old folders and throwing away lots of old paper.

Just stumbled over this old story and before I get rid of it, I’ll keep this digital backup:

The Technical side of Christmas: Newtonian Style

There are approximately two billion children in the world (persona under eighteen). However, since Santa Claus does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist religions (except maybe in Japan), this reduces the workload for ‘christmas’ night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the Population Reference Bureau). At an average (census) rate of3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming there is at least one good child in each (Santa has stated he only visits good children!).

Santa has about 31 hours to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out at 976.7 visits per second. In other words, for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/l00th of a second to park his sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house. Whew!

Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa’s sleigh is travelling at 650 miles per second - 3,000 times the speed of sound! For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.

The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500,000 tons, not counting fat Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the ‘flying’ reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job can’t be done with eight or even nine of them - Santa would need 360,000! This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 5,400 tons or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth - the ship, that is, not the monarch!

600,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance, and this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth?s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would each absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.

Not that it matters, however, since Santa as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650mps in .001 seconds would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 g’s. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.

If Santa Claus ever existed, he’s dead now.

google search terms

Looks like google started to index my blog.

Two search phrases have appeared in the stats. One of them is “ibm nipple replacement”.
The other one is australia season 4. I have no idea, when season 4 starts in Australia, but in the US, season 4 will start in 22 days.
A couple of promos and teasers have appeared on the web.

The season 4 prequel is definitely worth watching. It shows what happened between end of day 3 and 6 hours before day 4 starts.

And, just of the wire: Fox will be airing the first 4 hours within 2 days.

Where did I put my reading glasses

It has finally happened. The mozilla ad appeared in the New York Times.
Good luck, finding my name in the high resolution pdf.

some days…

just suck. And today was one of them.

It is done…

Yeah, I managed to setup a digital vcr in my server.
Check it out: http://www.hong.h42.net:8001
Username: gast / Password: gast

way cool

This is cool, http://www.komar.org/cgi-bin/xmas_webcam!

traveling for a burner

Since my LG burner refuses to even read discs now, I’ve decided to invest this week into further upgrading components. I cannot concentrate anyhow, since my mom and her boyfriend are still busy renovating and “upgrading” our kitchen and bathroom.
At first I wanted to buy a Plextor burner since my old CD Plextor burner still functions properly (after 3 years, is this too much to ask for, btw?). Unfortunately their new model is not available, yet and moreover it is quite pricy.
Last time I wanted to buy a Benq but went for the LG one instead since of LG’s reputation. I found encouraging user comments about the Benq DW1620 and looked for the best prices. Found a local dealer who had this model in stock and a good price as well. Called him and took a longer bus ride to pick it up. Learned about new villages that exists in this region as a bonus and cursed about the information system of the Deutsche Bahn.

Got the last one, some software and a pair of screws and returned home.

Well, so far the burner is great. It burned every media I had availabe, managed to read even scratched discs. It is also really quiet, not like the lg burner which made a noise like a jumbo jet when you inserted a disc. So, I love it… For now!

SuSe Enterprise

Got a call in the morning for a future job which involves Suse Enterprise. Decided to try an evaluation version since I have not been using it for 3 years. I had to jump through various Novell registration loops to get the urls and when I clicked on them, I got various server errors, like a tomcat runtime error. Got really fed up and wrote an angry email to novell tech support. This is just unprofessional. Googled a bit and found out that the university of michigan provides iso images as well. Unfortunately you need to register for that. Fortunately they are offering guest accounts and I managed to download the iso images with decent speed. I am not sure, if guest users are really allowed to d/l the isos, but anyhow.

The installation process did not work, of course. The installation system crashed with a segfault while scanning the partitions. Apparently the installer got confused with the lvm paritions or something. Grabbed another harddrive, unplugged the old one and did an installation. There has not been a lot of change. You still do the configuration via Yast2 - and there is still the console support.

My 8 month old lg burner seems to misbehave more and more. I think I need to replace it.

digital tv card, part two.

Great, after three weeks my new graphic card and the digital cable arrived from cyberport. Perfect timing, one day after I got rid of my TFT. At least I got the promised refund.

I’ve continued to play with the digital tv card, this time under linux. It took some time to get correct information about the necessary steps to get the newer hauppauge nova-t cards to run. Short recipe: You need kernel 2.6.9, and the dvb-t patch from bytesex.org. You don’t need a firmware image or anything else. Compile the kernel with the following options:

# Video Adapters
#
CONFIG_VIDEO_CX88=m
CONFIG_VIDEO_CX88_DVB=m

# DVB-T (terrestrial) frontends
#
CONFIG_DVB_CX22702=m

Configuring the card is a pure nightmare. You need to run the scan utility with a provided channel configuration file. I’ve spent hours figuring out, why the utility could not find the channels. Two things: the utiltiy is not very reliable (or the driver is not yet finished) and the channels file which I found was incorrect.

This file works:

# DVB-T NRW/Bonn
# T freq bw fec_hi fec_lo mod transmission-mode guard-interval hierarchy
T 514000000 8MHz 2/3 NONE QAM16 8k 1/4 NONE
T 538000000 8MHz 2/3 NONE QAM16 8k 1/4 NONE
T 650000000 8MHz 2/3 NONE QAM16 8k 1/4 NONE
T 698000000 8MHz 2/3 NONE QAM16 8k 1/4 NONE
T 826000000 8MHz 2/3 NONE QAM16 8k 1/4 NONE
T 834000000 8MHz 2/3 NONE QAM16 8k 1/4 NONE

If you use this file, you are able to create a tzap channels.conf file, which you can use with tzap or xine.

My channels.conf looks like this: (One line per channel)
RTL Television:538000000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_8_MHZ:FEC_2_3:FEC_2_3:QAM_16:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTE
RVAL_1_4:HIERARCHY_NONE:337:338:16405
RTL2:538000000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_8_MHZ:FEC_2_3:FEC_2_3:QAM_16:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_4:H
IERARCHY_NONE:353:354:16406
Super RTL:538000000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_8_MHZ:FEC_2_3:FEC_2_3:QAM_16:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_
1_4:HIERARCHY_NONE:433:434:16411
VOX:538000000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_8_MHZ:FEC_2_3:FEC_2_3:QAM_16:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_4:HI
ERARCHY_NONE:545:546:16418
ZDF:514000000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_8_MHZ:FEC_2_3:FEC_2_3:QAM_16:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_4:HI
ERARCHY_NONE:545:546:514
Info/3sat:514000000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_8_MHZ:FEC_2_3:FEC_2_3:QAM_16:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_
1_4:HIERARCHY_NONE:561:562:515
Doku/KiKa:514000000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_8_MHZ:FEC_2_3:FEC_2_3:QAM_16:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_
1_4:HIERARCHY_NONE:593:594:517
MDR Fernsehen:698000000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_8_MHZ:FEC_2_3:FEC_2_3:QAM_16:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTER
VAL_1_4:HIERARCHY_NONE:4657:4658:100
NDR FS NDS:698000000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_8_MHZ:FEC_2_3:FEC_2_3:QAM_16:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL
_1_4:HIERARCHY_NONE:4641:4642:129
SÜDWEST RP:698000000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_8_MHZ:FEC_2_3:FEC_2_3:QAM_16:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL
_1_4:HIERARCHY_NONE:4673:4674:226
WDR Köln:698000000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_8_MHZ:FEC_2_3:FEC_2_3:QAM_16:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1
_4:HIERARCHY_NONE:4625:4626:262
arte:826000000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_8_MHZ:FEC_2_3:FEC_2_3:QAM_16:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_4:H
IERARCHY_NONE:4385:4386:2
Phoenix:826000000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_8_MHZ:FEC_2_3:FEC_2_3:QAM_16:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1_
4:HIERARCHY_NONE:4401:4402:3
EinsMuXx:826000000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_8_MHZ:FEC_2_3:FEC_2_3:QAM_16:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_1
_4:HIERARCHY_NONE:4417:4418:6
Das Erste:826000000:INVERSION_AUTO:BANDWIDTH_8_MHZ:FEC_2_3:FEC_2_3:QAM_16:TRANSMISSION_MODE_8K:GUARD_INTERVAL_
1_4:HIERARCHY_NONE:4369:4370:256

If you use a recent version of xine, you can use this file to watch tv. Just click on the DVB button. You can switch channels with the playlist.

To be fair: Under linux, you are able to use an anlague card and the digital card simultaneously. If you use tvtime to watch tv, you can specify the video device with the -d option, e.g.: tvtime -d /dev/video1

there it goes again…

I’ve decided to return the Iiyama TFT and get an EIZO L768 instead. Amazingly the post office was not crowded with people that tried to send early christmas packages. I am really curious, if I’ll get all my money back, though, which I should according to the law.

I found a local dealer whose online system stated that they have the TFT on stock. Wrote a short email to ask them, if I could inspect the TFT before buying and they replied with no problem.

Went to the store in the afternoon and got told that they don’t have any in stock at the moment and that it would cost 15 Euros to inspect them. Was greatly disappointed and decided to order online since it was cheaper and I could return it without a problem again. Since I did not want to leave empty handed, I decided to get a digital tv card. I really did not want to buy another card from Hauppauge since their drivers just sucks. But the salesman persuaded me somehow. It is still not really common to bargain for a cheaper price in Germany, but I decided to try anyhow. After some persistent discussion, I got a 3 Euro discount. Not much, but better than nothing.

Turned out, that I was right with the driver mess. I still have an analogue tv card from Hauppauge and it seems that the tv application only supports one card at a time. It is not a big deal, since my ultimate plan is to put the digital card into my server and setup a digital vcr but it reassured my dislike of hauppauge drivers. Their newest driver from early December still crash and I don’t get any sound, so the situation is not improving. I did not buy an antenna with the card and decided to try the cheaper method: using an old aerial cable. I got a decent signal but I’ll buy a better antenna within the next days. Picture quality is really great, but switching between channels takes around 5 seconds which is too long, if your just flipping through channels.