0xBADCAB1E

Registration for Haxogreen Camp is open
The number of participants is limited to 100 people. So register early.

Kind regards,
Kabel

Today I was very motivated and decided to cook something. I’m not used to cook special things, and wanted to do dig into it for once. This is why I picked up a recipe here, bought everything that was needed and tried hard to make the best of it, the result:

It tasted very good, and was quite fun creating it, so maybe I’ll do it more often

Kind regards,
Kabel

PS: As people keep telling me that it does not look good, I have to say the following: Please consider the obfuscation performed by my mobile phone camera and the bad light conditions in my kitchen. Honestly it looked very good.

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ HaxoGreen 2010 SummerCamp July 22-25 2010, Dudelange, Luxembourg ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
”’HaxoGreen 2010”’ is the second iteration of the annual four-day outdoor camp in early summer 2010 organized by C3L [0] and syn2cat [1]. This rather informal and cosy camp takes place ”’from July 22nd till July 25th 2010”’. Whether you want to attend lectures and workshops, hack on your projects or just share 3 midsummer nights outdoors, socialising with other hackers, artists and geeks, ”’HaxoGreen”’ is the place to be. No need to be a 1337 H4X0r, we welcome all inquisitive people from around the globe. The camp is organized by the community around Luxembourg’s Hackerspace syn2cat and the Chaos Computer Club Lëtzebuerg. We appreciate your participation, be it by holding a lecture, a workshop or presenting your projects and ideas during a 10 min lightning talk. Also don’t miss the movies and music in the evenings on our big screen!

– LOCATION
The camp is located at the scouts’ ground near the city of Dudelange in the southern region of Luxembourg. The camping ground features adequate restrooms and shower facilities. Indoor rooms for lectures and workshops are also available. The nearby town of Dudelange, near the borders to France and Germany, offers access to shops and markets for all of your grocery needs.

– SUGGESTED PRESENTATION AND WORKSHOP TOPICS
Participate with your lectures, panel discussions, workshops, or lightning talks. (Though you can give a lightning talk without submitting its topic) Your lectures and workshops don’t have to be limited to technology. Lectures with a background in society, community, science and art are welcome as well. These are some examples of the inter-disciplinary fields that our audience would be interested in:
* Green IT and Green Hacks
* Virtualized Environments
* Cloud Computing
* Darknets and Hackerspaces
* Computer Security Incident Response and Mitigation
* Do-it-yourself Science
* Molecular Gastronomy
* Wilderness Survival Tactics
* Amateur Robotics
* Radio and Mobile Communications (GNURadio, etc.)
* Electronic Art (vj, dj, installations etc.)
* Net Neutrality, Intellectual Property and Privacy Aspects
* Active/Liquid Democracy and Political Activism
* Sustainable Housing and eco-friendly Living …and anything that is not on the list.

– DEADLINES
* Deadline Abstracts: March 31, 2010
* Acceptance Notification: April 14, 2010 Papers are welcomed, but not mandatory. Submitted papers can be published on the camp website/schedule. Please send your proposals, before the deadline, to camp@hackerspace.lu, making sure we can get back at you. Don’t forget to mention any hardware or software requirements that your talk or workshop includes. We would be happy for every distributed version of the CfP.

– INFO
The camp is organized by the community around Luxembourg’s Hackerspace syn2cat and the Chaos Computer Club Lëtzebuerg. For any questions about this camp, send an email to camp@hackerspace.lu
Website: http://events.hackerspace.lu/camp/2010/

Yesterday, I planed to drive back to Luxembourg for the weekend. Due to the bad weather and the bad driving conditions, I finally decided to stay in Bochum.

My hacker colleagues form the University had already some plans for the weekend, and they managed to convince me to join them for a nice evening. So, my Friday night began at 18:47, with a “U-Bahn” that did not come, due to the bad weather… fortunately the next was able to pick me up, and I drove to the “Bochum Hauptbahnhof” where Joshua, a nice guy form the uni lives. tmh and h0yt3r were already there and we went to Joshuas place to have some chill-out time, with some beers, food and a movie. It was fun, until I literally exploded his chef seat :S (I bought him a new one today, knowing the time one passes on such a chair when you study at the RUB, I know I had to do it, and the faster the better).

After this we left the building at 23:00 and took the U-35 to the university. We weren’t alone, unfortunately a group of very “strange” young people were singing, and making stupid things in the train… we hoped they would get out of the train before the university. We were hoping wrong … they all got out of the train at the RUB, like we did. We were lucky, as we found out that there was another party at the uni, the Theology guys had orgnaized one too… the strange people all went there

The rest of the night, we spend chilling and listening to music in the front of the lecture halls. There were plenty of people and the ambiance was just perfect.

So, I had a great time with people I knew for quite a while (tmh, h0yt3r were people I got in touch with in my early Internet times and I was following their progress for all this time). So you see, Geeks, Nerds and whatever names people want to give us, we also socialize sometimes, and go away from our PCs, and out of our dark rooms.

As a conclusion I have to say that the party was good, but I’m not a very big fan of parties and I could not party all weekends, but for once in a while it is okay, looking forward to the next “IB-United” party!

Best regards,
Kabel

P.S: I put a new page online: “about me” The page is briefly describing the author of this blog.
If you know me:
Feel free to tell me, if you find that the description is not matching my personality.
Else If you don’t know me:
Feel free to get an impression on who I am.

Hey, as some people wanted to see my home office, here you go, please enjoy KOC: Kabel Operations Center

Sorry for the bad quality of the picture my phone cam was not able to do better.

Note that the I can operate all these laptops with only one mouse and keyboard, thanks to synergy, a TCP KVM Switch running on, at least, the 3 operating system you can see on this pictures. Furthermore, copy & paste from one OS into the next is no problem, which is providing a lot of comfort in everyday life.
I’m currently using the following operation systems:

* freeBSD 8.0. The laptop on the left, mainly monitoring servers, traffic, services etc…

* Mac OS X. Laptop in the middle and the 24″ screen. Mainly for chatting, showing pdf’s papers I have to work on and movies (This laptop is the worst thing I ever bought, you can simply not work on such a foo, but at least, I tried :’( )

* A Linux based OS. The 17″ Screen and the Thinkpad on the right. This laptop is mainly used for working and developing

You may have noticed all these lights and lava lamps etc, of course they can be piloted by the PCs you see but more on this in one of the next blog posts.

Regards,
Kabel

Hello out there!
Just a short note to inform you that my blog can now be reached over 2 new domains:
0xbadcab1e.lu and badcab1e.lu

Of course you can still access it over ipv4 as well as ipv6.
I’m modifying my blog at the moment, some features will be added that you’ll notice others you won’t. I’m mainly increasing the security and automating some boring tasks.

Have a nice evening,
Kabel

Recently I changed the name of my blog to: 0xBADCAB1E (it will be reachable over 0xbadcab1e.lu soon too)
So, why did I chose this name?
I picked this name because I found it a good characterization of my life/hobbies:

* It is hexadecimal, quite a lot of things I do at the moment are expressed in hex, for example in cryptography which is part of my everyday life. All in all the hexadecimal system is quite present in computer sciences, and I like it!

* 0xBADCAB1E is an error code:“0xBADCAB1E (“bad cable”) Error Code returned to the Microsoft eVC debugger when connection is severed to the debugger”[1] Windows debugger, em, interesting, this might show my penchant for opensource software and show my need to disassemble things to find out how they work.

* CAB1E is hexspeak[1] for cable which is English for “Kabel”. As Kabel has been my nick for several years now, this fits perfectly.

* BAD: Well, I don’t consider myself as a being a bad person. So I guess this part of the name will stay the mystery Maybe I’ll find a good explanation for this some day.

During my last “critical infrastructures” lectures I was researching some information about attacks on the Web-Of-Trust as I am digging in this subject at the moment, of course, I’m considering the security aspect of it. Maybe this Web-Of-Trust model is exactly the candidate I’m searching for to show people how important trust is in IT as finally, everything relies on this simple principe of trust…
So during this research I came across the 0xDEADBEEF attack, searching for further information about that topic I saw some pages dedicated to hexspeak. Thats how I came to this new name, which sounds better than that boring “Kabel’s Blog” I used before.

So I hope you like it as much as I do Since this hexadecimal name has only a length of 8 chars it makes it ideal for some further usage, more on this on one of my next blog posts.

Best regards,
Kabel

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexspeak

I want to announce the HaxoGreen 2k10 camp in my blog as well. So what is this camp about, a short description;

“HaxoGreen 2010 is the second iteration of the annual four-day outdoor camp in early summer 2010 organized by C3L and syn2cat. This rather informal and cosy camp takes place from July 22nd till July 25th 2010.”

It’s our second camp, planning is already in progress and it works quite well. I’m optimistic that we’ll manage to provide a great camping location, facilities as well as talks and hacks. More information can be found here

Soon, one of my little dreams will be fulfilled. Since I’ve known of its existence, I wanted to be a part of it, at least once!

Friday, 17:00 this event will start. I’m speaking of “The UCSB iCTF“. The iCTF is one of the oldest, most played CTF in the world. It has made its apparition on several media, especially in Germany as German universities win this challenge regularly (ENOFLAG from Berlin won last year). There I first heard of CTF competitions. I was immediately fascinated by these people understanding the machine and what it’s running in such a way that they were able to control it in a way that was not foreseen, and own other experts.

So Friday I’ll be part of the Fluxfingers team, and hope to have a good time and collect some flags. Fluxfingers got a huge amount of new members in the last weeks, so that our team will be more powerful (hopefully) that at the ruCTFe.

Anyhow I’m really looking forward to this event. Tomorrow, is a last training where I guess we will discuss the strategy and who is responsible for what and has to setup what on the vulnerable box, in order to permit more eased hacking, patching and protecting in general.

Somehow I’m also looking forward to the guys of Squareroots and the other teams. I guess this one of the parties the geeks have… other people go to discos and to the bermuda3eck… we go to university and try to understand code, while eating pizza and consuming caffeine.
In the close future I see a Syn2Cat/C3L capture-the-flag contest. Really, I think that will be a great event, too.

Best regards,
Kabel

Yesterday, there was a “Bildungsstreik” in whole Germany. Lots of things are bad, they all say. Inscription fees are too high, working conditions are too bad, Bachelor/Master system is crap… and many more.

According to the articles I read, NRW is the Bundesland in which the inscription fees are the highest, or at least, where people complain the most about it. My university is located in NRW. I’m studying at the Ruhr Universität Bochum, with over 32 000 other students. This makes the RUB one of the 10 biggest universities of Germany.

In the news, yesterday, they said that there has been people demonstrating all over NRW, they took as example Düsseldorf, and Münster. Strange, RUB was not enumerated in the universities that did demonstrations. In fact, I don’t know any person that was demonstrating at the RUB even if there had been demos organized.

I saw some tags “BUILDUNGSTREIK” (yeah, with the missing “s” …) on walls and blackboards, for myself I had too much lectures and work to take a day off, especially for some sitting around and drinking beer without any idea that actually has some minimal chance to lead to a result.

According to my research yesterday night, there are students at the RUB (or from the left activist scene that have nothing to do with the uni, like they use to call it here) that are occupying some lecture rooms. When I see, that they were 90 (!) yesterday night (taken from the infos they provided over twitter) I think the situation at the RUB cannot be that bad. 90 persons of 32 700 is not representative, and I guess you will always find 90 persons that are bored and want to do like the others…

Or, perhaps, the Bachelor/Master system is fault that nobody has time to go on strike? Rumors say that the workload of the Diplom/Magister has been squeezed in a way they fit in 3-5 years. This would explain why people were all working yesterday and nobody had time to complain </irony>

I don’t want to say that people should not go on strike, on contrary, if there is something wrong, they should. In this case I don’t find it a good way to solve the problems that exist, because there are problems, of course, I would not negate that. I simply don’t get what will be solved by the fact of occupying HZO 10 (biggest lecture room at the RUB) and through this let people like me miss lectures… because I’m sure there will be problems in the lecture I have at 12:00 in HZO 10…

Other rumors, that just reached me through a web 0.5 media, like kwisatz use to call it, is that the students occupying that room are “Dauerstudenten” which of course would also go on my nerves if I had to pay that amount of money for inscription during 10 or more years…

I will not publish any other thought about the rumors I got, on what those people are studying, except, for the people that are studing at the RUB, they are “Jenseits” which means: On the side where there is a park, girls and people enjoy their free time, and not “Dieseits” where there are only nerds, concrete and people have to use their brains every free minute in order to solve exercice sheets…

Go on strike if you want, but don’t force people to miss lectures because you are bored.

Edit: Wed – 22:03 // After having been at university the whole day, I have to say that none of my lectures got disturbed, not even the one in HZO. This is certainly a good point. I personally disliked the new tags I saw everywhere, on the walls, floors, etc… they were just simply without any fantasy. Okay, there are plenty of stupid tags at RUB, but some are cool and make me smile when I read them, “Hier könnte Ihre Werbung stehen”, “Beton brennt doch”, etc, someday I will take some photos of the best. This time, people concentrated on showing the way to HZO10, inside the buildings as well as outside… sorry, but this is really a stupid way of destroying things. Everyone at RUB knows where HZO10 is! Those tags have even no chance if you consider the art point of view… there are beautiful tags on the walls of the RUB, but the new one will never  count as one of them.