0xBADCAB1E

Yesterday, I planed to drive back to Luxembourg for the weekend. Due to the bad weather and the bad driving conditions, I finally decided to stay in Bochum.

My hacker colleagues form the University had already some plans for the weekend, and they managed to convince me to join them for a nice evening. So, my Friday night began at 18:47, with a “U-Bahn” that did not come, due to the bad weather… fortunately the next was able to pick me up, and I drove to the “Bochum Hauptbahnhof” where Joshua, a nice guy form the uni lives. tmh and h0yt3r were already there and we went to Joshuas place to have some chill-out time, with some beers, food and a movie. It was fun, until I literally exploded his chef seat :S (I bought him a new one today, knowing the time one passes on such a chair when you study at the RUB, I know I had to do it, and the faster the better).

After this we left the building at 23:00 and took the U-35 to the university. We weren’t alone, unfortunately a group of very “strange” young people were singing, and making stupid things in the train… we hoped they would get out of the train before the university. We were hoping wrong … they all got out of the train at the RUB, like we did. We were lucky, as we found out that there was another party at the uni, the Theology guys had orgnaized one too… the strange people all went there

The rest of the night, we spend chilling and listening to music in the front of the lecture halls. There were plenty of people and the ambiance was just perfect.

So, I had a great time with people I knew for quite a while (tmh, h0yt3r were people I got in touch with in my early Internet times and I was following their progress for all this time). So you see, Geeks, Nerds and whatever names people want to give us, we also socialize sometimes, and go away from our PCs, and out of our dark rooms.

As a conclusion I have to say that the party was good, but I’m not a very big fan of parties and I could not party all weekends, but for once in a while it is okay, looking forward to the next “IB-United” party!

Best regards,
Kabel

P.S: I put a new page online: “about me” The page is briefly describing the author of this blog.
If you know me:
Feel free to tell me, if you find that the description is not matching my personality.
Else If you don’t know me:
Feel free to get an impression on who I am.

Hey, as some people wanted to see my home office, here you go, please enjoy KOC: Kabel Operations Center

Sorry for the bad quality of the picture my phone cam was not able to do better.

Note that the I can operate all these laptops with only one mouse and keyboard, thanks to synergy, a TCP KVM Switch running on, at least, the 3 operating system you can see on this pictures. Furthermore, copy & paste from one OS into the next is no problem, which is providing a lot of comfort in everyday life.
I’m currently using the following operation systems:

* freeBSD 8.0. The laptop on the left, mainly monitoring servers, traffic, services etc…

* Mac OS X. Laptop in the middle and the 24″ screen. Mainly for chatting, showing pdf’s papers I have to work on and movies (This laptop is the worst thing I ever bought, you can simply not work on such a foo, but at least, I tried :’( )

* A Linux based OS. The 17″ Screen and the Thinkpad on the right. This laptop is mainly used for working and developing

You may have noticed all these lights and lava lamps etc, of course they can be piloted by the PCs you see but more on this in one of the next blog posts.

Regards,
Kabel

Hello out there!
Just a short note to inform you that my blog can now be reached over 2 new domains:
0xbadcab1e.lu and badcab1e.lu

Of course you can still access it over ipv4 as well as ipv6.
I’m modifying my blog at the moment, some features will be added that you’ll notice others you won’t. I’m mainly increasing the security and automating some boring tasks.

Have a nice evening,
Kabel

Recently I changed the name of my blog to: 0xBADCAB1E (it will be reachable over 0xbadcab1e.lu soon too)
So, why did I chose this name?
I picked this name because I found it a good characterization of my life/hobbies:

* It is hexadecimal, quite a lot of things I do at the moment are expressed in hex, for example in cryptography which is part of my everyday life. All in all the hexadecimal system is quite present in computer sciences, and I like it!

* 0xBADCAB1E is an error code:“0xBADCAB1E (“bad cable”) Error Code returned to the Microsoft eVC debugger when connection is severed to the debugger”[1] Windows debugger, em, interesting, this might show my penchant for opensource software and show my need to disassemble things to find out how they work.

* CAB1E is hexspeak[1] for cable which is English for “Kabel”. As Kabel has been my nick for several years now, this fits perfectly.

* BAD: Well, I don’t consider myself as a being a bad person. So I guess this part of the name will stay the mystery Maybe I’ll find a good explanation for this some day.

During my last “critical infrastructures” lectures I was researching some information about attacks on the Web-Of-Trust as I am digging in this subject at the moment, of course, I’m considering the security aspect of it. Maybe this Web-Of-Trust model is exactly the candidate I’m searching for to show people how important trust is in IT as finally, everything relies on this simple principe of trust…
So during this research I came across the 0xDEADBEEF attack, searching for further information about that topic I saw some pages dedicated to hexspeak. Thats how I came to this new name, which sounds better than that boring “Kabel’s Blog” I used before.

So I hope you like it as much as I do Since this hexadecimal name has only a length of 8 chars it makes it ideal for some further usage, more on this on one of my next blog posts.

Best regards,
Kabel

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexspeak

I want to announce the HaxoGreen 2k10 camp in my blog as well. So what is this camp about, a short description;

“HaxoGreen 2010 is the second iteration of the annual four-day outdoor camp in early summer 2010 organized by C3L and syn2cat. This rather informal and cosy camp takes place from July 22nd till July 25th 2010.”

It’s our second camp, planning is already in progress and it works quite well. I’m optimistic that we’ll manage to provide a great camping location, facilities as well as talks and hacks. More information can be found here