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 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.

I’m staying with my friend Fabienne. I hired her for Hack a Day in 2005, worked with her at Netscape, and now she’s the CTO at Doctr.

I flew AirFrance and connected through CDG (as you might have guessed). This is the third international trip I’ve flown and I have yet to receive a vegetarian meal despite it being shown on my itinerary. I think the problem stems from carriers like United and Delta using partners for their flights. Even though you can buy the ticket and select seats through their sites, they don’t bother transmitting the meal preferences.

I had every intention of reading the Oliver Sacks book my folks gave me for Christmas on the flight, but AirFrance just happened to be showing… every single film I missed this summer. I watched fours movies back to back: WALL·E, Hellboy II, Délire express, and Tonnerre sous les Tropiques.

I wrote the “Good times” post the other day with the understanding that my luck would change. I arrived at TXL, but one of my pieces of luggage did not. I had my duffle bag, but my pelican case was nowhere to be found. I’m not one to sweat missing baggage, and this is the first time in my three years of heavy traveling where I’ve had trouble. The only problem was that along with all my semi-precious hardware, the case also contained my winter coat, a necessity in Berlin. I was reassured by the number of people that were also missing luggage; the chances of them finding a whole group of bags was much greater than finding just mine. I left my information and they delivered the box the night of the next day.

I brought my Android Dev Phone 1 with me and picked up a German prepaid SIM card from Blau. I had one last year and the 10€ credit lasted me the entire trip. This year they’ve added 1GB of data for an additional 10€. That’s a much better rate than the $10 I gave AT&T to use 500K on my phone while in CDG. Unfortunately, you need a German speaker to navigate Blau’s site and to activate the data on the phone. I’ve temporarily added my German cellphone number to my Twitter profile if you need to reach me. My normal cellphone number is also pointed at the VoIP phone here, so you might be able to reach me there. The time difference is +6 hours from the east coast.

I’ve been easing back into Berlin life. I still haven’t adjusted to the time difference. I was awake all day Thursday, but then slept away Friday. It’s now Saturday and I was up at a decent time again. In the spirit of LA, we held hacker drinkup Wednesday night at Bar 23. I realized that I have more favorite restaurants here than in LA. Favorite may not be the best word. I just enjoy eating out here a lot more. Amazing variety and public transportation means location isn’t a big deciding factor when it comes to what to eat. I forgot I had put together a vegetarian map last year. An interesting wrinkle now is that Berlin has a smoking ban. It’s spawned some interesting indoor partition construction similar to what I saw after Lincoln, NE passed theirs.

That’s it for now. Back to the other blogging job. It’s 3PM here, so I’m still blogging incredibly early for the US audience.

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

Jeff speculated last night (very early this morning?) that the first nuisance I’d notice after returning would be when I stepped outside the house and realized there is no tram in Las Vegas. East Berlin has nice wide streets and is covered with a great tram system. I think that disappointment will pass once I realize that I can drive to any grocery store and it will be open 24 hours instead of 8-8. I found the 23 hour store around the corner from our place on pretty much the last day I was in Berlin. Esther also introduced us to a falafel place with a large vegetarian menu on New Year’s Eve as well. Too late smart.

My New Year’s Eve was fairly calm, well at least my contribution, Berlin was absolutely nuts. The streets were full of rolling smoke from everyone setting of fireworks. The mortars barely cleared the rooftops. You’d have exploding things thrown at you and bouncing off your legs from people driving by or just crossing the street. On the elevated train, you would see rockets whizzing parallel to the train travel. The underground stations were especially smoky and had way too many explosions.

We went to Tim Pritlove’s for NYE and then I headed out with GRL Vienna afterwards to find a specific club. Finding the place was a pain in the ass since it was named “West Germany”. The number wasn’t visible from the street; the name wasn’t posted anywhere. You just walk up some random stairwell till you find people standing at a door and ask them if this is the right place. We did that three times. The “club” was just a partially demoed office complex. All the hanging ceiling panels were gone and you could see where the drywall framing had been removed with a sledge or something. The edges were lined with soon to be broken bottles and people guarding piles of coats. It was a good time but I don’t think there was a single berliner there.

Fabienne rented the “Berliner Fahr Bar” near the end of congress for a handful of us to celebrate on. It’s a two car tram that has a bar built into. So, you just cruise around Berlin drinking on the tram and giggling excessively every time it comes to a sudden stop and everyone nearly falls over. It has “Drink ‘N’ Drive” emblazoned inside and out. It’s not near as interesting as it would be in the US, because people in Berlin can drink legally on the public transportation anyway.

Congress was interesting and I did a handful of posts for Hack-A-Day about it. I found it fairly stressful. I think most of that was due to it falling right at the end of this long trip plus having 7 people sleeping in a 1bdr apartment. Also, once I found out that every session was being streamed online, I just wanted to stay home and watch them all, since my goal is to report on the most interesting ones.

My Nokia N95 did a great job as a camera on this trip. It takes 5mp pictures and once I got back to my apartment each night it uploaded them to Flickr without any prompting. Only problem being that they’re generically numbered till I go through and label them. So most people see them before explanation has been added. I hope to get it on a US data plan soon (once I figure out how to get my number ported).

Next up is CES in Las Vegas. Engadget is bringing the team again and I hope to meet up with them. I won’t be reporting, but I’ll probably try scouting for some HMDs and similar devices.

I’m probably going to Shmoocon in DC for my third year in Feb. Definitely going to SXSW in Austin in March followed by a trip home to Nebraska. Fabienne is hosting hardhack in Berlin some time in April, but there’s also ROFLCon in Boston, and ToorCon Seattle some time around that time. I’m also considering Ars Electronica next fall in Linz, AT. We’ll see what I’m able to make it to this year.

A few people are disappointed by this… they’d appreciate it if I actually made the effort. There is one thing I’d love to improve though: my pronunciation. Think of all of the boilerplate you use: ordering at a restaurant, you just need to say the name of the food; taking a taxi, you just need the address. Pronounce those word correctly and you’re gold.

Most of the German I can read I’ve picked up from context. [Disclaimer: this is my interpretation and definitions are most likely imprecise] Words like strasse, allee, tor, and platz are all on street signs for streets, ways, circles, and squares. The prefixes ein and aus are used for beginnings and ends, entrances and exits. I can even read signs for “don’t block the fire lane”, not that I need to know that.

I know many different words for meat so that I can avoid it. Menus have a pretty standard vocabulary that make them easy for context learning. You know you’re going to see common groups: hot drinks, tap beer, bottle beer. You’ll also see portion sizes: klein, mittel, and grosse.

Hmm… looking back, a post on first semester German isn’t that interesting. I guess the key take away is this: if you ever find yourself down and out in Germany, look for the nearest exit. It will be labeled ausgang or ausfahrt and mispronouncing those words just warms my heart.