Captains Log

I just uploaded the rest of my images from the Chaos Communication Camp. So why don't you just head over to my Gallery and check out the Album?
And there is even one video.

The last day of the camp brought us two lectures we attended, " Camp Network Review" and "Camp Closing Event".

The first one was about the network infrastructure available on site, and some issues the NOC encountered during the Camp. Well, the Closing Ceremony is the closing ceremony of course. It's available for download.

Afterwards I went to C-Base again, they wanted to do another USB FM-Transmitter Workshop. As they prepared for the Workshop I went back to our tents, where the following conversation took place:

Dude: "They disconnected the network."
Me: "Okay, lets go home then."

And this really was it. I went back to C-Base to get my soldering irons, and to say goodbye to these fine people. Then we packed all our stuff, my tent and the paviliion. The plan was that I take the pavillion with me because I've room to store it somewhere.
The Dude and Mooglie still planned to stay until the morning, so I left them and their tent pretty lonely on our camp ground. I've still to check back with them if there have been some parties in the evening.

For me, the camp was an extraordinary experience. I met many great people, had lots of good chats. For me it was kind of assuring that I'm not the only one who dislikes the current way of german politics, and that there is some activism going.
I hope that there will be a camp taking place in two years in the Netherlands.

Saturday morning started promising. Again I was awake at 7:30, which made me one of the first ones being active on the camp site. I later on had a nice chat with some fellow geek who told me that breakfast was available until 15:00.
Okay, I was having my lunch around this time.
Anyway, friday was the day the keysigning party took place. We met at the rocket. I brought my computer which turned out to be wrong. Obviously I just should've printed out the fingerprint of my key, including my details (Name, comment, email adress). Thanks to one of my french neighbour we fixed this pretty fast. And I wasn't the only one being not prepared, though.
The keysigning party is about establing a web of trust. You can create a PGP key with any name, so people can't know for sure that the person behind the key is really the person he or she claims to be.
Keysigning parties deal with this issue: People meet at one location, exchange their fingerprints and look at each others passport - or other ID cards. So you know that the person you just met really exists. To check the eMail adress you sign his or her key, and send it to the given email adress. The signed key can then be uploaded to any keyserver by its owner. This is how email addresses are verified.

During the keysigning party it started to rain. We entered the Art & Beauty hangar, and I met with some people cacert. They where around to assure people, which is the same like keysigning, just for website certificates.
At some point I noticed that I had an umbrella in my cargo trouser. Pressing the laptop hard to my chest I made it to our tent. Things looked different there: All the hardware had been shutdown, the server was standing on a chair. Bottles of water where acting as some kind of flood barrier. Our site was a mess.
As it stopped raining we learned that it hadn't hit us as hard as it had others: Our neighbours behind our tents went home, their site had been drowned in water. There was a small lake behind our tents, people started to play soccer there. It's kind of a miracle why the mood was still good.

Because of the bad weather I missed all the lectures. And because all my people wanted to attend Tits and bits I staid on watch.

As most of you will have noticed the camp is over now, but there are some articles missing. Days 4 and 5 are still missing a complete review, so do some more things I encountered.
Originally we planned to stay until monday morning, but after the closing ceremony on sunday the CCC people removed networking from the entire site. We were isolated from the Internet, so I decided to go home.

Expect the rest of the Camp-stories to arrive tomorrow, and during the next few days. I've still three weeks of holiday. :)

Friday evening brought big fun, as suddenly there was lots of noise coming from the Art & Beauty hall. I wasn't in the mood to get into this noise. The rest of my fellow campers made a trip to the hall, thou, and came back being exited: Imagine a DJ standing infront of his audience, playing somewhat monotone music. Now, the audience has drum sticks and several tables are set up, equipped with everything that makes noise when being hit: Snare drums, drums, metal parts.
Thing is: Everyone of the crowd gets into his or her own mood, playing around with the sticks as he or she likes. The noise is amazing, you've the feeling it'll blow away your ears. Some high pitched beeping noise is kind of a present, too. ;-)
As they came back telling their story I couldn't help myself but try it, too. And it was big fun! The hall was crowded with people, many who where just watching. Many photographers and camera teams kept me from starting right away. After all, it sounds odd to do so.
But from a pagan point of view this is a kind of shamanic experience, get into the trance of your own sound, be influenced by the people around you, and just let go.
It's damn amazing, and I can recommend to you all heading over the website gottseisgetrommelt.de.
If you've ever the chance of being part of gottseisgetrommelt, take your chance, grab the sticks and let go!

Afterwards there was a damn cool party going on, with lots of electronic music, techno mainly. We enjoyed dancing, but soon I went to bed.
Well, soon is really misleading here. I don't have any feeling about time anymore. I get up at about 7:30 in the morning, have breakfast around 10:00. Lunch is after 15:00, and dinner not before 21:00.
So I left the Art & Beauty hall, intending to prep for the night. So I went into the public bathroom, and had no water. Now hold on a second, give me a break? No water? And the text of a sign at the door came to my mind: No water between 4am and 5am. Looked at my mobiles clock: 4:15am. Okay, time to go to bed.
Guess what: I was awake at 7:30 this morning...

Zusammenfassung:
Freitag abend wurde es lustig: Meine Mitcamper gingen in die Art & Beauty-Halle, aus der nicht zu überhörender Lärm drang. Als sie später wieder kamen erzählten sie mir, die Halle wäre voll mit allem möglichen Percussions-Kram, und jeder könne sich Drumsticks nehmen und da wahllos, bzw. nach eigenem Gutdünken, drauf einhacken.
Das mußte ich dann doch selber sehen, obwohl mir eher nach Ruhe zumute war. Ich gesellte mich also zu den Zuhörern und -schauern des Spektakels. Einige Photographen und Kameraleute hielten mich zuerst davon ab, selbst aktiv zu werden.
Aber es war genial. :) Aus heidnischer Sicht würde ich das quasi als schamanische Erfahrung bezeichnen: Die unheimliche Lautstärke, das Trommeln nach eigenem Willen, das aus sich herausgehen. Wahnsinn, war echt gut. :)
Schaut Euch mal gottseisgetrommelt.de, das tuts. Und wenn Ihr mal über diese Aktion stolpert, macht auf jeden Fall mit!

Danach gabs noch eine richtig gute Elektroparty, mit starken Trance-Einfluß und leichter Anlehnung an Drum&Bass. Irgendwie paßt diese Musik zum Camp, auch wenn ich sonst eher auf die härteren Klamotten stehe.

Ich machte mich als erster auf den Weg ins Bett, natürlich mit Zwischenstopp Badezimmer. Da gab es dann kein Wasser, und meine kleinen grauen Zellen projezierten mir das Bild eines Schildes vor das innere Auge. Darauf stand: "Kein Wasser zwischen 4:00 und 5:00 Uhr." Doch schon so spät...
Das Camp hat mein Zeitgefühl voll durcheinander gebracht, gegen 7:30 Uhr bin ich wach, Frühstück gibts gegen 10:00 Uhr, Mittagessen gegen 15:00 Uhr, und Abendessen dann so gegen 22:00 Uhr. Ungefähr, mal mehr, mal weniger. Ich komme also seit Tagen mit drei bis fünf Stunden Schlaf aus.

Sorry for not updating my Blog yesterday. It seems that there was a problem with my server or the internet connection at home. I couldn't reach the machine to setup the ssh-tunnel. No tunnel, no encryption, no updates.
Yesterday was an interesting day in terms of lectures. I had several talks taking place in both hangars at the same time, so I didn't know where to go.

Hardware hacking with C-Base
I ended up with the folks from C-Base. They offered an USB FM-Transmitter Workshop. The goal was to solder a small device that can be powered by USB. Using the output of an analogous sound device one can set up a small "radio station". The hardware is a design from piradio.de (german).
The workshop was well visited, in fact there where many people interested in soldering the device than there where devices available. They hope to get a bunch for the weekend, so check the URL above if you're interested in visiting another (possible) workshop on sunday.
From my point of view there was some organisation missing. The people attending the workshop were nearly left alone with the task of soldering it, instead of several people overlooking progress and watching out for errors. For my table I took this job, offered some advice here and there, and gave several introductions into soldering. Three people where using the wrong kind of tin-solder. The material was dedicated to higher temperatures, so the elements weren't connected to the layer correctly.
what made assembling the kit more complicated was the fact that the board lacks holes where the transistors, resistors and capacitors are inserted. So it became some kind of SMD technology, but there wasn't any glue to fix the elements onto the board.
There was no antenna cable available. When I'm planning a workshop and want the people to actually use the devices, I would bring some.
It was fun anyway, no offense ment.

Check out CCC07-Album at my Gallery. There are tags missing, I'll do this later. Maybe.

Alle "politisch interessierten Menschen" waren heute um 16:30 Uhr zu einem Workshop des AK Vorratsdatenspeicherung eingeladen.
Ich war anfangs ja verwirrt als die Frage aufkam, warum man da sei, aber schnell deuteten sich mehrere Themenbereiche an, die dann in Kleingruppen besprochen wurden.
So beschäftigte sich eine Gruppe mit TOR-Exit Nodes, deren rechtliche Position sowie die Unterhaltung einer solchen Node als e.V. Das Problem mit den Exit Nodes ist derzeit, dass diese zwar legal sind, weil Anonymisierung nicht verboten ist, die Polizei aber reihenweise Server beschlagnahmt.
Auch das Thema Campaining war von gesteigerten Interesse, hier wurden Möglichkeiten besprochen, Bürger verständlich auf die bestehende Situation aufmerksam zu machen.

Vom Campaining beeinflußt war letzten Endes auch die Kryptoparty-Gruppe, der ich mich anschloß. Ähnlich wie bei Linux Installations-Parties ist hier der Ansatz, Kryptosoftware auf nette Art und Weise an den User zu bringen. Anstatt mit einem Haufen Howtos um sich zu werfen. ;-)
Wir kamen überein, eine zentrale Anlaufstelle zu schaffen, wo entsprechende Aktionen geplant werden können, wo aber auch das Wissen um mögliche Tools gesammelt wird, damit die Veranstalter quasi als Multiplikatoren auftreffen können. Klar war auch, dass jeder Einzelne sich überlegen muß, was er leisten kann, so dass es Unterschiede bei der Toolauswahl und dergleichen gibt.

Zumindest die Campaining- und die Kryptoparty-Gruppe haben heute abend noch ein Treffen anvisiert. Die Campainer treffen sich am Feuer im Art & Beauty-Bereich beim Hackcenter, die Kryptos nebenan in der Art & Beauty-Halle. Letztere um 21:00 Uhr. Wer will, kann gerne dazu kommen.

I attended the lecture "21st Century digital Bikes. It dealt with bikes that are using PWM motors to have some kind of digital assistance during ones ride.
Bottom line is that you can drive longer routes more easily, and at high speads of up to 25km/h, or higher if you don't care about laws. ;-)
if you want to mod your bike, note that you have to pay between 600 an 1000 Euro for a motor kit, and another 100 to 200 Euro for a set of battery. The eletronics and controller needed is peanuts. ;-) But you can use upright bikes, recumbent bikes and trikes.
The lecture was a nice introduction into this topic, including the fundamentals of the PWM motor. It was a pity that the sound system wasn't working properly, and that it was hard to understand the lecturer.

The next lecture that is of interest for me will be at 20:00 (8pm) today, Der richtige Weg in die Zukunft.
Until then I've to do some shopping. I need at least one fan for our server. It crashed last night, obviously on DIMM was connected properly and the machine crashed because memory was exhausted.
After I corrected the error the disk that reported failures yesterday evening started complaining again, so I took the server offline for half an hour.
Oh yes, and we need to get more drinks and food. The water is nearly empty, we're drinking about 2 bottles (1,5l) per person.

But now I'm sitting in a comfortable chair, still coding the rest of the bluetooth script (for mass up- and downloads).

Oh yes, and I still have to visit the C-Base tent for the USB-FM-Transmitter Workshop.

Or spoken in a camp context: "The early geek enjoys a queueless shower." :D

Last night we had another server crash, around 5am. I can't imagine why. The server was fine yesterday, and there shouldn't be that much load at this time, should there?
Anyway, I'll enjoy a breakfast with toast, honey and a good and strong cup of green tea. And a core file analysis. ;)

Good morning everyone.