0xBADCAB1E

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.

Yesterday/Today, I participated in my first academic CTF competition. The Ruhr-Uni-Bochum, has a Capture The Flag team named:”FluxFingers”. I went to their training last Wednesday and it seemed to be exactly what I was looking for, a huge amount of fun and really fit hackers.

So, a friend who also started the master in ITS at the RUB, and I went to the our first challenge, the ruCTFe. This is an extended version of the ruCTF, it open to all universities of the world, so there were really participants from everywhere, the communication wasn’t always easy as some persons were thinking Russian was the language to use (in IRC for example, or some challenges were Russian -.-)

So after one hour of delay the CTF started, looking forward, at that moment, for 10 hours of fun, exploiting, patching, documenting and all the stuff you have to do in a CTF. What happened was a totally different story… Once the image was decrypted we noticed immediately that this would not be a usual ctf. Everything was related to android, you had an emulator on which the vulnerable services had to run. The setup of the emulator, understanding how everything was intended to be, and making things run took us quite a while. Same for other teams, so that after 4 hours nobody had any flags nor service running… not really what you think a ctf is. A reboot if the vulnerable image finally made things better, nobody understood why, but that was our smallest problem, it was up an running, and we were getting defense points. We managed to be first a long time, but didn’t made it till the end.

The vulnerable sources were really hard to understand, we found some bugs, we exploited some, but it didn’t bring us much, as our best exploit was running on a service that no other team managed to start… We got some points for advisories and for defense, I think we got only one valid flag. Which was not much different for the other teams.

Squareroots managed to exploit one service and collect a huge amount of flags. We think they exploited the same vulnerability as we did, except that they had less problems to setup their android image.

I found some piece of exploits, and helped some people having problems to understand different parts of the service F (written in Python) and wrote some exploits. All in all, it was really fun. Looking forward to the next CTF, the UCSB on 4th December. FluxFingers members told me that there would be more to exploit and it would be less “who is best at setting up his linux android”

To finalize, we finished at place 12 of 43 teams. All German universities did great like usual, squareroots (Mannheim) won, 0ldEurope (Aachen) was a great target to test my exploits , but they had a good rank at the end too. FluxFingers member were little bit disappointed by the challenge I think, they were looking forward to steal flags, not to configure android emulators.