Blackhat Asia 2006 / Tokyo

As some of you may already now, I will be at Blackhat Asia 2006 in Tokyo, having a talk on botnet detection and mitigation.

I will arrive on the 4th of Octobre and leave on the 7th. Feel free to drink a beer with me, just drop me a line as some already did. I'll probably also go clubbing in Roppongi some evening (maybe the 4th?) -- looking for someone to join me.

The Move Itself

Today, I had the final move to Aachen with most of my stuff. Thanks to the great help of several friends, this was a real blitzkrieg move. We had it all in the car from the first floor within fifteen minutes and managed it to get it all into the 4th floor again in one single hour. Thanks to Henrik, Philipp, Florian and Tobias at this place!

The opposite to this was my laminate maneuver: it took me nearly six hours to finish the remaining three quarters of the floor of my 16 square meters room. But it indeed looks great now and all I had to cut the too long boards was a tiny Aldi handsaw. Unfortunately, no pictures here.

Now I have finally chosen some IKEA stuff, but it's not ordered yet...

Prohibition of `Hacker Tools' in Germany

As heise writes, the German government plans to criminalize what they call `hacker tools' (if they already use such a misleading term, why not `haxor toolz'?). This is yet another example that impressingly shows that politicians know nothing about the Internet world; we all have already learned that the Internet is a set of tubes.

This would be like sueing Heckler & Koch for manufacturing a weapon that was used to shoot a police officer.The CCC has a good writeup, why this criminalization is bad.

As they say, they just want to realize a new EU directive; but this one is going way to far. Since I am working in the Computer Security industry and already had to develop proof of concept malware in the past for heise, so they could test some AV, I am directly affected by this.

I will try to actively fight this law and already dropped an eMail to my local MdB (however I doubt, this will change anything -- my belief in democracy was lost long ago).

Moving to Aachen

«Moving is never fun!» is what they told me before and they seem to be right. Now that I will start studying computer science in Aachen, I decided to move there into a `flat share'. My new flatmate is Philipp (24 yrs), studying `Recycling Engineering' or whatever the correct translation would be.

Yesterday, we started to do my floor and found out that there was already four layers of floor stacked. Was less than not funny to remove all these, especially after carrying 35 square-meeters of laminate 2.5 kilometres through Aachen. I will post some pictures Philipp made, once I get my hands on them.