RobotSkirts

The hacker conference ShmooCon is coming up February 5th – 7th, 2010 in Washington D.C. They’ve posted the official schedule so I’ve decided to pull out the talks that I’m interested in:

GPU vs. CPU Supercomputing Security Shootout Collin Brack is presenting on the rise of general purpose GPU usage in security tools. A couple years ago I wrote a love letter to the FPGA hoping that one day we would be adopting it as our coprocessor of choice. It seems now that the GPU has largely taken up that role for doing massively parallel calculations. Nvidia has been pushing CUDA while Apple recently rolled out OpenCL support in Snow Leopard so all new Macs can take advantage of either implementation. Nvidia has a nice collection of resources for learning CUDA on their site.

The New World of Smartphone Security – What Your iPhone Disclosed About You Trevor Hawthorn is going to talk about attacks against the iPhone and what sort of data it exposes to the network. It’ll be interesting to see what is out there, but I’m curious as to what it shares that would make it more exposed than your average Windows machine. There’s also a talk about BlackBerries, but no mention of Android.

Build your own Predator UAV @ 99.95% Discount One of the few hardware talks so it’s a must see for me. I haven’t looked into UAVs that much but I did see a great talk at 25C3 where the live demo was controlling a plane in France from Berlin.

Bluetooth Keyboards: Who Owns Your Keystrokes? Michael Ossmann will demo over-the-air keylogging which will be super rad.

I’m in Vienna for the next few days over Christmas. Boarding the train leaving the airport, I was reminded of one of my favorite Vienna facts by the info screens. In the late 1800s, the city constructed two aqueducts to bring in water from the alps. That’s right, in Vienna unadulterated mountain spring water comes straight out of the tap and it’s delicious.

I looked back to see if I had done any blogging last year over the course of my six week trip. Much to my delight: I had (I also found IM IN UR MANGER KILLING UR SAVIOR). Never avoid blogging because it feels narcissistic; you will write things that you’d otherwise forget and you’ll appreciate seeing it again. Reposting it, like I’m about to do, definitely is narcissism. Most of the trip was brought to you by my missing N95-3.

Things I found: I made a video while procrastinating packing which talks about my elaborate GrandCentral forwarding. I wrote about learning German by context and my love of a 24hr city. The trip actually started in Vienna where we made cocktails in cement mixers, hunted for vegetarian food, and Flo gave me the only haircut I’ve had all year. I provided a rather concise review of Prague. It doesn’t come up in my closing post, but I remember being ready to come home by the end of the trip.

(Yes, that’s LAX)

I arrived in Berlin three days ago. I’m here for the Chaos Communication Congress just like last year. When I booked my roundtrip, I chose dates that were three weeks apart (I return on January 6th) under the auspices of saving money by avoiding the holiday. Prices have since dropped, but I’m glad I’m here for the extended period. I’m not really in a position to take a vacation, so any change of locale is beneficial.

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Dear Charles de Gaulle,

You suck at designing airports. Upon landing, you taxi forever, presumably getting closer to the airport, just to be dumped onto the tarmac in the freezing cold. You’re then loaded onto buses and driven to the terminal. The exposure to the elements is actually teaching you to wear your jacket, since you’ll need the warmth no matter where you are in the terminal. You then navigate a maze and are rewarded with passport control. Play close attention to all announcements, “The deaf dumb women in the terminal is a scam”; you’ll find them above the TGV station. Cross the terminal, clear the helpful security, and you’re ready to wait for your flight. The quantity of seats in the terminal is based on the average number of travelers at any time, not the capacity of a plane at a particular gate, meaning everyone is under-served most of the time. I felt that I had won the battle and charge triumphantly down the jet-way… only to find another bus. It drove us off into the middle of nowhere to board. I certainly hope you’re better at aircraft carrier design. France cannot be France without an awful airport.

Cheers,
Eliot

I’ll be in Nebraska through March 23rd. Let me know if you want to meet up.

Nothing like a “I’m headed to SXSW” post to shake the rust off of a stagnant blog. I’ll be in Austin for 6 days with various awesome crews: Propeller, Blogsmith, Weblogs, and Team Black plus an assortment of nerd assholes. Then I’ll be in Nebraska for 10 days visiting my family and hopefully seeing old friends coming in from Portland and Germany. My photos will be uploading automatically to Flickr (with GPS tags). You can also follow me, sweetums, on twitter. Thanks to Twibble those can have GPS coordinates too.

I’m back in Las Vegas after spending six weeks in Europe. Actually, time of writing I’m still on the twelve hour plane flight home. I lucked out and got an exit row seat, so I COULD be getting stuff done comfortably, but I’ve mostly been slipping in and out of consciousness. That’s either from a lack of sleep or because I finally decided to start on the number theory/cryptography book Fabienne gave me. Multiplying two three-digit base seven numbers together isn’t so easy on the idle brain. Luckily my rowmate had been snagging me food boxen, etc while I snoozed, so I’m not starving. (more…)

It just slipped past midnight in Berlin, so I’d like to wish all of you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I spent Christmas Eve at home eating my family’s traditional dinner: spaghetti. More out of necessity than anything since I didn’t have anything else to eat. Going through the posts from last year I was reminded that James Brown died on Christmas Day and Gerald Ford a day later. To honor these two great men I give you: dj BC 13 James Brown songs in 4 minutes and Gerry Ford on The Simpsons.

Do I plan on learning German? No. In fact I make a point to say “thankyou” instead of “danke”. I’m using it as an apology, as in: “sorry if I appeared simple in the previous conversation; I only speak English”. (more…)