Tag: conference

28C3 – Behind enemy lines

I was lucky enough to get a ticket for the Chaos Communication Congress 2011 in Berlin, Germany. So many people wanted to attend the CCCongress that the tickets were sold out in an instant. But the current location can’t handle more visitors so we’re forced to somehow limit the number of visitors unless the location or the concept of the CCCongress changes. Both options don’t sound really inviting, but refusing people to come isn’t fun either. So we’ll see what the future brings.

But I’d like to raise the point that the CCCongress is very much an event made by the people, i.e. the participants. It’s not that there is an overly mighty set of people who decide everything and are responsible for having a great event. It’s everybody that is responsible for helping out if somethings need to be done, contributing ideas, talks, workshop, etc. It’s rather a place where you play a part by helping physically and paying a fraction of the cost to have a good time. That means that you can’t make a CCCongress by paying the entrance fee only. It’s not a show for your entertainment. Hence you can’t have expectations that somebody has to do things for you. This applies to things you don’t like, too. If you don’t like stuff that is happening, stand up and change it. Don’t sit and complain. This especially applies to things like sexism or other politically incorrect things. There is no personnel being obliged to do anything. It’s all our big party and you’re supposed to contribute yourself to make it great. I mention this, because there were complaints about supposedly right-wing people being present but nobody did anything.

Many people go to the CCCongress for the talks. And well, I didn’t really managed to watch many of them, but the following make a list of notable talks, because they were in some ways, say, “interesting”.

But you can have very good talks as well. For example

A very big applause needs to be given to the video team. It’s just amazing that the recordings were available within a few days. I just envy those guys for rocking so hard.

Now it’s time for a shameless plug: As I want to watch the recordings of this CCCongress and I know that I won’t do it myself, because the last years proof that I don’t watch the videos anyway, I’ll publicly show two videos of the recordings every Wednesday in the local Chaos Computer Club. So if your disk is filling up with videos that you wanted to watch but never will, feel free to show up on the “Chaotic Congress Cinema“. Funny thing is, that there are 100 videos recorded and if we watch 2 videos every week, we’d finish all of them within the year 🙂

LinuxCon Brazil 2011

I was lucky to be invited to LinuxCon Brazil, taking place in *drumroll* Brazil! Sao Paulo to be precise. The conference centre was very spacious and the conference itself seemed to be much bigger than in Japan.

My talk on GNOME 3 (actually 3.2 and 3.x) was well received and I hope I was able to entertain a bunch of people and make some of them try the new GNOME. Fortunately, our friends from OpenSuSE just released their new version a couple of days ago and brought some machines and media to try it out. Needless to say that it features the latest and greatest GNOME release. We had a good discussion during the talk and I talked to many people after the talk. There was more interest that I expected. I was told that even Linus and Dirk Hohndel commented on it in the speaker’s room when I was not there.

I couldn’t really attend the other talks as I wanted because they were held in Portuguese :-\ There was translation but only for the foreign speakers not talking in Portuguese. So sadly I had to stick to talks that I either knew or didn’t interest me that much. But there were a couple of interesting ones, nonetheless 🙂 My favourite was Jan Kiszka talking about “Developing Linux inside QEMU/KVM Virtual Machines” because I learned how to actually be able to pass data from my host system into my guest QEMU machine.

So the conference could have made more effort to actually indicate whether the talks were held in English or not. Other than that, it was a good conference which was held in a pretty good conference centre. As the other South American conference I attended a couple of weeks ago, it slipped behind schedule. But only for half an hour 😉

It wasn’t all too easy to get to Brazil though. I had flight troubles in Amsterdam with KLM again. The security at the gate wanted to search my bag but I refused. I was told to either let them search the bag or wait for the supervisor. I chose to wait as I had quite a bit of newspaper left. Eventually one of the security guys called me out and told me to go out of the gate area to talk to the supervisor. We talked and came back to the gate where I was about to put my stuff into the xray machine. But then the guy came and told me that the flight attendant told him that I couldn’t fly. So I asked the woman directly whether I was denied boarding. She said yes because I caused a queue. I demanded a list of my rights because I was denied boarding and she sent me to the Transfer desk. Then she left… When I went to the transfer desk, I figured out that I was not referenced as being denied boarding but No-Show, i.e. I just wasn’t present. But that’s ridiculous as I sat in the gate except for three minutes when the supervisor called me out. For that reason, I wasn’t provided a list of my rights and the transfer agent wasn’t friendly at all. A second transfer agent managed to get me on the next flight though. I thought I’d like KLM, at least for them flying to South America not crossing the US. But I probably have to go with Iberia the next time.

I’m looking foward to come back to Brazil, either for GNOME Forum or for LinuxCon 🙂

Ekoparty 2011

I was invited to Ekoparty in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It all went very quickly, because when I was accepted for my talk on Virtualised USB Fuzzing using QEMU and Scapy, I couldn’t read email very well. I was abroad and had only a replacement laptop (which we got at MeeGo Summit in Dublin) at hand because my laptop broke down 🙁 And of top of that I wasn’t very well connected. Anyway, I got notice exactly two weeks before the conference and actually I had other plans anyway. But since it was in Argentina and I haven’t been there yet, I was very eager to go.

I was going from Hamburg via Amsterdam and Sao Paulo to Buenos Aires. And back from Buenos Aires via Charles de Gaule to Berlin. After my first fight I had a good break at Shiphol but when I wanted to board the next flight, I was denied at first. After a couple of minutes, some officials came and I was interrogated. Because my itinerary looked suspicious, they said. So I was asked and searched and the information I gave was promptly checked by they woman and her smart-phone. Weird stuff. The next flights and airports were fortunately much better.

The very first day of the conference was reserved for the keynote and workshops. Unfortunately, the workshops were held in Spanish only so I couldn’t really follow anything. But I still attended some folks playing around with an USRP. It was interesting enough despite the Spanish. They decoded normal FM radio, pager messages and other (analogue) radio messages flying through the ether. The keynote was held in Spanish, too, but two translators simultaneously translated the talk into English. It’s the first time that *I* am the one needing a translation device 😉 I didn’t fully get the keynote because the there was a lot of noise in the radio of the Spanglish :-/

The first talk by Agustin Gianni from Immunity was about Attacking the Webkit Heap and was, well, very technical. A bit too detailed for me as I don’t have much desire to exploit memory issues in Webkit, but it’s good to know that there people looking into that. Just after that, there was a talk about security of SAP products. The message I got was, to read the SAP advisories and documentation. Because he was showing exploits that used vulnerabilities that were either known and fixed or documented. It was still a bit interesting for me as I didn’t know much about SAP systems and could see what it’s actually about.

I don’t have much to say about the iOS forensic talk, because you can find the things he mentioned with a one liner: find / -name '*.db'.
Ryan McArthur talked about Machine Specific Registers which I didn’t even know what it was. But apparently CPUs have special registers that you usually don’t use. And these have special capabilities such as offering debug facilities. Also you can issue a simple instruction to detect whether you are in a virtual machine or not. That sounds damn interesting. With Intel it’s called Last Branch Recording. And he implementing something that would be able to trace programs like Skype. I wonder though what difference to PaiMai is. An implementation using these facilities apparently exists for Linux as well.

A bit off the wall was Marcos Nieto talking about making money with Facebook. So he realised that he could send the AJAX request, which some Flash game sends to the game server, himself. He didn’t think about writing a bot playing the game for him though. Instead, he used a proxy to capture the HTTP traffic his Flashplayer was generating and replaying that traffic with the proxy software. And the money part would then be to sell the account that had all the experience points on eBay. I hope it was just the translation and the crappy quality of the radio that made it seem so lame.

As for my presentation, I wasn’t too lucky with the MeeGo laptop I used, because it only has an Atom processor which doesn’t have KVM support. That is very bad if you want to do something with QEMU 🙁 But I tried to prepare my things well enough to not have many problems. But what happened then was really embarrassing. I prepared demos and I did that very thoroughly. I even recorded some videos as second line of defence in case something fails. But I didn’t expect anything to fail because my demos were simple enough, and just a few copy&paste jobs. That’s what I thought and Murphy proved me wrong. I hate him. So my demos did not work, of course. I still don’t really know why, but I guess that I left a QEMU instance running due to the nervousness. And that instance would still mess around with the pipes that I was using. So lessons learnt: Whenever you think it’s simple enough, think harder.

Demo-Video. If it doesn’t play inline (stupid wordpress) please download yourself.

The rest of the conference was relaxed and the talks were much better than the day before. I feel that the second day was saved for the big things while the first was thought of as a buffer for the people to arrive. There was the SSL talk which caught a lot of attention in international media even before the conference. For reference: The issue was assigned CVE-2011-3389. I was astonished, really, to hear *the* talk being held in Spanish. I absolutely expected that thing to go off in English. Unfortunately, I couldn’t understand much of the things that were told. It took me quite a while to understand that the “navigator” the translatress was constantly referring to is actually the browser… So I was disappointed by that talk, but the expectations were high so it was easy to be disappointed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lauFlKi56aM

So all in all it went fine. It’s a nice enough conference, really relaxed, maybe even too relaxed. Given that there was one track only, it didn’t really matter that things bent the schedule by two hours. I felt that generally things went off the radar of the organising folks, most likely due to organising a conference being very stressful 😉 But well, it would still have been nice if they actually provided the facilities they promised to give a talk, like a USB cable or a demo laptop 😉 I barely got a T-Shirt 😀

CHIS-ERA conference 2011 in Cork

While being in Ireland, I had the great opportunity of attending the CHIS-ERA strategic conference 2011 in Cork. Never heard of it? Neither have I. It’s a conference of European academic funding bodies to project and discuss future work and the direction of the work to be funded. Hence, it had many academics or industrial research people that talked about their vision for the next few years. If I got it correctly, the funding bodies wanted some input on their new “Call” which is their next big pile of money they throw at research.

The two broad topics were “Green ICT” and “From Data to Knowledge“. And both subjects were actually interesting. But due to the nature of the conference, many talks were quite high level and a bit too, say, visionary for my taste. But it had some technical talks which I think were displaced and given by poor Post-Docs that needed to have a presentation on their record to impress their supervisor or funding body.

CHIS-ERA Flower
However, for the Green IT part, almost all the speakers highlighted how important it was to aim for “Zero Power ICT”, because the energy consumption of electronic devices would shoot up as it did the last decade or so. But it hadn’t necessarily been much of problem, because Moore’s Law would save us a bit: We knew that in a couple of month, we could place the same logic onto half the chip which would then, according to the experts, use half the energy. However, that wouldn’t hold anymore in a decade or two, because we would reach a physical limit and we needed new solutions to the problem.

Some proposed to focus on specialised ICs that are very efficient or could be turned off, some others proposed to build probabilistic architectures because most of time a very correct result wouldn’t matter or to focus research on new materials like nanotubes and nanowires. The most interesting suggestion was to exploit very new non volatile memory technologies using spintronic elements. The weirdest approach was to save energy by eliminating routers on the Internet and have a non routing Internet. The same guy proposed to cache content on the provider as if it wasn’t done already by ISPs.

After the first day, we had a very nice trip to the old Jameson Distillery in Midleton. It started off with a movie telling us the story about Jameson coming to Ireland and making Whiskey. It didn’t forget to mention that Irish Whiskey was older and of course better than the Scottish and the tour around the old buildings were able to tell us what makes Irish Whiskey way better than the Scottish. Funnily enough, they didn’t tell us that the Jameson guy was actually Scottish 😉 I do have to admit that I like the Irish Whiskey though 🙂 The evening completed with a very nice and fancy meal in a nice Restaurant called Ballymaloe. I think I never dined with so many pieces of cutlery in front of me…

CHIST-ERA D2K visualisation
The second day was about “From Data to Knowledge” and unfortunately, I couldn’t attend every lecture so I probably missed the big trends. When I heard that Natural Language Processing and Automatic Speech Recognition were as advanced as being able to transcribe a spoken TV or radio news show with a 5% error rate, I was quite interested. Because in my world, I can’t even have the texts that I write corrected because I need to use ispell which doesn’t do well with markup or other stuff. Apparently, there is a big discrepancy between the bleeding edge of academic research and freely available tools 🙁 I hope we can close this gap first, before tackling the next simultaneous translation tool from Urdu to Lowgerman…

CCCamp 2011


It happened again! The Chaos Communication Camp took place a couple of weeks ago near Berlin. I was all excited to go although I had to miss the last days of the Desktop Summit.

The weather was mostly nice and the atmosphere, especially at night, was really fantastic. Everybody was really nice and there was so much creativity all over the venue that it was really hard to not start to make or hack on something.

While it had many very interesting things to be seen, I think to most amazing machine on the ground was a “Crepes printer”. Some austrian dude built a machine which would make you a fresh crepe. Including some chocolate sauce! Just right next the that were some friends that intend to launch a sattelite and already had their radio equipment ready. With their massive antenna they spoke to the moon and measured the reflections coming back.

The participants also got a fancy badge called “r0ket“. It’s an amazing device and people did awesome stuff with it immediately. Given the presence of 3D printers and lasercutters, people added all sorts of extensions to the r0ket. But some enhanced their r0ket with good old knitting goodness.

The whole CCCamp, taking place on an old russian airbase, was themed very aeronautical so everything was somehow related to space travel or rocket science. It also had many talks on those subjects which I didn’t attend a lot. I was too busy hacking or socialising.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teiwdhHYIQk

You can only see a tiny fraction of the many artisty stuff it had on the ground. But you do see an old MIG which got pwned along with a spacy car. He got trolled quite well, I’d say but decide for yourself:

You can try to grasp the atmosphere by looking at these areal shots:

You can see some more pictures and press articles in the CCCamp Wiki. The next Camp will be “Observe. Hack. Make. 2013.” and I’m very much looking forward to attend it.

Desktop Summit 2011 in Berlin

This years GUADEC^W DesktopSummit took place in Berlin. Sure thing that I attended 🙂 Due to loads of stuff happening meanwhile, I didn’t come around to actually write about it. But I still want to mention a few things.

It was, like always, pretty nice to see all the faces again and catch up. The venue was almost excellent and provided good lecture halls and infrastructure, although the wireless was a bit flaky and spots to sit down and get together were sparse. Anyway, I have never seen so many actual users or wannabe users. Being in the heart of Germany’s capital definitely helped to make ourselves visible. Funnily enough, I met some folks who I chatted up during LinuxTag while I was presenting GNOME. I invited them to come to the DesktopSummit and so they did \o/

There were many talks and I didn’t see most of them. In fact, I was volunteering and meeting people so I couldn’t attend many lectures. But there was nothing I regret not having seen. The ones I did see were interesting enough, but not ground breaking. There’s a good summary over here.

We tried to record the talks but for some technical reasons it didn’t work out of the box. The network was too slow and no disks were available. We convinced the guy in charge to make us buy disks which eventually got used but I actually don’t know whether the lectures will be released at all.

A nice surprise was Intel giving away ExoPCs. In return they required you to sit and listen to presentations about their Appstore thingy called “AppUp“. Apparently a technology that tries to resemble OBS (because of distributing software via the web) and .debfiles+Synaptic (because of distributing software with a native GUI) with an additional payment layer in between. But it fails big time to do so. Not only can it not build binaries out of the sources that you give it, but it also can’t track dependencies. Welcome to 2011. Needless to say that it’s heavily targeted for Windows. Double fail that you can’t build Windows software for their store thing without having a Windows platform (and development tools) yourself.

The PC itself is neat. It’s a full tablet with only one soft key. The MeeGo version that came with it was out of date and updating was a major pain in the afternoon. It involved getting a USB keyboard because the OnScreenKeyboard would of course not show up if you open a terminal. And you needed a keyboard, because you can of course not update the software with that MeeGo version. There is no software management application at all. And most certainly, Intel’s new AppUp thing is not included in the latest and greatest release. In fact, it’s not even easily installable as it involves googling for the RPM file to be manually installed. By now I talked to Intel engineers and it seems that an actual vendor is supposed to integrate their version of the AppUp thing in the rest of the OS. So Intel doesn’t see itself in the position to do this. Other weird glitches include the hardware: While the ExoPC has a rotation sensor, it would be way to boring if it worked; so it doesn’t. And the hardware turns itself off after a while. Just like that. It feels like we have at least 3 years of engineering left before we can start dreaming of being able to ship a tablet platform that is ready for a day to day use. I have to note that the content centric UI approach is definitely very handy. Let’s hope it improves by fixing all those tiny things around the actual UI.

The discussion about a joint conference was bubbling up again. Of course. The main argument against a joint conference seems to be that it is considered to slow GNOME’s development down if we meet together, because we have to give time to the other people and cannot do our own program meanwhile. There are probably many variations of that argument, including that we do not collaborate anyway, so let’s rather not invest time in a joint conference.

While I do agree that the current form of the conference is not necessarily optimal, I don’t think that we should stop meeting up together. At the end of day, multiple (desktop) implementations or technologies are just pointless duplications. So let’s rather try to unify and be a unity (haha, pun intended) instead of splitting up further. I am very well aware of the fact that it’s technically unrealistic right now. But that’s the future we endeavour and we should work on making it possible, not work against it. So we don’t necessarily need to have a fully joint conference. After all, our technologies do differ quite substantially, depending on how you look at it. But let’s give each other the opportunity to learn about other technologies and speak to the key people. We might not fully make use of these opportunities yet, but if we design the conferences in a way that the camps have enough time to handle their internal issues and before or afterwards do a joint thing, then no harm is done if opportunities weren’t taken.

Another hot topic were Copyright Assignments. There was a panel made up of interesting people including Mark Shuttleworth. The discussion was alright, but way too short. They barely had 45 minutes which made it less than 15 minutes each. Barely enough to get a point across. And well, I didn’t really understand the arguments *for* giving away any of your rights. It got really weird as Mark tried to make another point: It would be generous if a contributor donated the code to the company and the participants should take into account that generosity would be a strong factor contributors would strive for. I haven’t seen that point being discussed anywhere yet, so let me start by saying that it is quite absurd. What could be more generous than giving your code to the public and ensuring that it stays freely available?! Just to be very clear: The GPL enables you to effectively do exactly that: Release code and ensure that it remains free.

I was delighted to see that the next GUADEC will take place in A Corunha. I’d rather have gone to Prague though. But maybe the Czech team can be motivated to apply again the next time.

LinuxCon Japan 2011

Thanks to the Linux Foundation I was able to attend LinuxCon 2011 in Japan.

I used the opportunity to distribute GNOME 3 DVD Images and leaflets during my talk about GNOME 3 which was well enough received I’d say. While I collected a lot of experience approaching people and telling them about all the niceties that GNOME 3 offers over the last few month, I really had too little time to tell all the brilliant things about our new GNOME. Anyway, it was nice to be on the very same schedule as the very important Linux people like Greg KH, Linus or Lenny.

The conference itself was hosted in a very spacious building: The Pacifico in Yokohama. One could see that impressive building from our hotel room. Just nice. The conference was well organised and the provided amenities such as food and drinks were good enough. I was particularly impressed by the simultaneous translations that were done by two elderly men.

The talks were generally interesting, probably because I haven’t been to a kernel focused conference and I found it interesting to get new input. My favourites were the Kernel Developer Panel were one could pose question onto the Kernel people face to face and the talks about the social aspect of Kernel development.

Despite all the trouble in Japan, we had a very good time and in fact, there weren’t many indicators to the earthquake or the nuclear catastrophe. The most annoying inconveniences probably were the turned off elevators. Other than that, we didn’t really see any disrupted services or chaos or problems at all. Traveling in Japan is a real pleasure as the train system is gorgeous and the cities are very well mapped. You encounter a city map just about every other corner and it’s very detailed and helpful. Japanese people are extraordinarily friendly and although there is a language barrier, they try to understand and help you. The downside is, that Japan is quite expensive. Especially the train system, but also lodging and food. However, the quality is very good, so it’s probably worth the money.

I’m looking forward to attend the next LinuxCon, maybe even in Japan 🙂

GNOME at LinuxTag 2011

Last week, I had the pleasure to attend LinuxTag and manage the GNOME booth. All in all, the GNOME booth went quite well. We had loads of visitors wanting to see the new GNOME Shell and discuss its design. But it was such a busy time that I didn’t even had the opportunity to leave the booth and look at all the other projects. It was, however, pretty nice. It took me a day to recover though. Being at the booth for all the four conference days in a row from (ideally) 09:00 until 18:00, always smiling and entertaining was quite exhausting.

To help the GNOME presence: I printed flyers and posters all day before LinuxTag. It was a pain to do, because we are lacking good material. We do have some Brochures to print out, but they are either outdated or in a miserable quality. It definitely needs some quality brochures for GNOME. We have more Posters and some of them are really nice. But I couldn’t render some of them because of bugs somewhere in the stack. Anyway, I managed to print posters on A4 paper which meant that they had to be glued together… To ease poster printing in the future, I uploaded the PDFs I generated to the wiki.

What worked well was our booth setup: We had Posters, Sticker, Flyers and (thanks to openSuSE) GNOME 3 Live DVDs to give away. Also our booth looked nice with GNOME banners hanging from the walls. Also, the ordered furniture looked nice to the outside, i.e. a presenter desk, a long cupboard and a bar table together with bar chairs made it look inviting. However, we lacked a small table and some chairs to cater for the many friends that were in the booth and not in front. Thanks to all the helping people. It was really awesome how quickly our booth looked nicely.

And fortunately, there is room for improvement. It would have been nice if we brought, i.e. T-Shirts to sell or Posters and Flyers for the GUADEC. But everything was still really okay. I hope we manage to do so well next year, too.

So thanks to Canonical for the EventsBox and openSuSE for the DVDs! If you happen to be in the need of some of the DVDs, give me a shout and we’ll arrange the shipping.

RFID Workshop at CampusGruen’s Datenschutzkongress

I was asked to give a workshop about RFID for the CampusGruen Datenschutzkongress in Hamburg. So I did 🙂

I used the opportunity to introduce the audience to the basics of RFID, i.e. what technologies exist and what they are used for. Also, I took arguments from pro and anti RFID groups to have them discussed.

You can have a look at the slides altough I doubt that they make much sense without actually having heard what was to be said. We spend good two hours talking and discussing over my twenty-something slides. Thanks again to the interested audience.

Afterwards, we had a small hacking session. I brought some RFID readers, tags, a passport, etc. and we used all that to play around. We also scanned some wallets to find out whether anybody had unwanted chips in their wallet.

GNOME @ FOSDEM 2011

I am very excited about having attended this years FOSDEM. Unfortunately, times were a bit busy so I am a bit late reporting about it, but I still want to state a couple of things.

I'm going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting (I wonder how that image will look in 2012 😉 )

First of all, I am very happy that our GNOME booth went very well. Thanks to Frederic Peters and Frederic Crozat for manning to booth almost all the time. I tried to organise everything remotely and I’d say I partly succeeded. We got stickers, t-shirts and staff for the booth. We lacked presentation material and instructions for the booth though. But it still worked out quite well. For the next time, I’d try to be communicate more clearly who is doing what to prevent duplicate work and ensure that people know who is responsible for what.

Secondly, I’d like to thank Canonical for their generosity to sponsor a GNOME Event Box. After the orginal one went missing, Canocical put stuff like a PC, a projector, a monitor and lots of other stuff together for us to be able to show off GNOME-3. The old Box, however, turns out to be back again *yay*!

Sadly, we will not represent GNOME at upcoming CeBIT. But we will at LinuxTag. Latest.

Anyway, during FOSDEM, we got a lot of questions about GNOME 3 and Ubuntu, i.e. will it be easily possible to run GNOME 3 on Ubuntu. I hope we can make it possible to have a smooth transition from Unity to GNOME Shell. Interestingly enough, there isn’t a gnome-shell package in the official natty repositories yet 🙁

It was especially nice to see and talk to old GNOME farts. And I enjoyed socialising with all the other GNOME and non-GNOME people as well. Sadly, I didn’t like the GNOME Beer Event very much because it was very hot in the bar so I left very quickly.

So FOSDEM was a success for GNOME I’d say. Let’s hope that future events will work at least as well and that we’ll have a strong GNOME representation even after the GNOME 3 release.

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