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How ironic that www.boingboint.net linked to an article How to fake a fingerprint just yesterday ;)

Here's an article (sorry, in German) from the Chaos Computer Club about this. Just look at the screenshot at the bottom.

It's quite old, but that's certainly not a confidence building measure from Microsoft.

However, those systems are able to be fixed (to my knowledge, don't use windows). A rooted box with a kernel module installed to hide itself, has to be completely restored.

IIRC, there was an article on slashdot a while back about a Windows kernel-level rootkit. And this is a nice piece of writing about how to make one for Solaris. As for Linux, I'm not so sure how easy it is, but I could probably work it out if I had the time.

The german Chaos Computer Club has an archive of lectures/talks/workshops from their anually congress .

Or chess...

Ah, Solaris 10, the rootkit writers friend.

Maybe, but there is a significant difference: Solaris 2.6 is a relatively ancient release by now, having been released about 7,5 years ago (August 1997). Windows XP, on the other hand, is much younger (first released September 2001), and if I buy a new computer now, I'd expect SP2 to be installed already, too, which is only six months old.

That being said, I think Solaris 2.6 will actually get more secure again in the future, simply because the number of people who know how to attack it will decrease. I remember an anecdote about someone who brought a box with a default install of SINIX (sorry, no info on which version) to a Chaos Computer Congress years ago; according to that story, he hooked it up to the network and told people that whoever would be able to root it first could keep it. Noone managed to, however, because it was too obscure (one might add that he didn't reveal any details about what OS was on it etc., of course). It may be an urban myth, but it was told to me by a friend who actually attends the Congress every year, so I wouldn't be surprised at all if it was true.

howto:
http://www.ccc.de/biometrie/fingerabdruck_kopieren

copy in action:
german: https://ds.ccc.de/084/fingerprint
(d0h, google still can't translate https documents directly?!)

howto:
http://www.ccc.de/biometrie/fingerabdruck_kopieren

copy in action:
german: https://ds.ccc.de/084/fingerprint
(d0h, google still can't translate https documents directly?!)

just check:
http://www.ccc.de/biometrie/fingerabdruck_kopieren ?language=en

Given what I saw on last years 21C3 MySQL 4 will fall flat on its face if someone starts to test the security of this version of the product.

The sas thing is: I am not kidding. Don't use too long usernames on the SQL client-side which could be (by coincidence) the same location where your SAP-System is installed.

"I apologize to those people who may be angry with me, but hopefully most will see the humor in the whole situation ... and realize that my attempt to bring joy and a smile to people's faces was successful"

Personally I wasn't too impressed with the site to begin with, hoax or not. It didn't hold a candle to the likes of the Chaos Computer Club's Blinkenlights project.

I'm in the same country; following some of the Swiss ISPs' discussions on related topics on the SwiNOG list brings up a few pretty scary issues.

Frankly, what can one do? The EU and its ilk have been soundly defeated in two major national referenda here, and yet successive governments bulldoze ahead with plans to join up at any cost. Nobody seems to give a flying shit about issues like these

Swiss ideas about data protection always relied on the premise that the government is trustworthy, which it usually was. Now we start seeing a prime example why "trust us, we'll never misuse the information/capability to gather information" is a load of bull.

As to what individuals can do, I can think of three easy things:

* Make your acquaintances, family and colleagues understand, as simply as possible, the consequences of unimpeded governmental authority to collect data, and of what can go wrong with it, using real-life examples.
* Vote against every single politician who makes noise about allowing this sort of crap
* Obfuscate, obfuscate, obfuscate. Use SSL. Use PGP. Use SSH. Store data on PGPDisk, GBDE, CFS, or some of the Linux methods mentioned here.
There's not a whole hell of a lot you can do about voice, until someone comes up with a simple, compatible, free/low cost VoIP or analog line encryption method. None of these things is impossible to break through or get around for a really determined eavesdropper, but you can sure do your tiny little bit to make it harder for "them".

Frankly, I think it's ironic that, in the last national vote about joining the EU, the most vocal voices against it from among my colleagues came from, you guessed it, expats from EU countries who moved here exactly because they hoped Switzerland would not follow the lead of the rest of this continent in issues like this.

As far as security goes, I would risk saying that is is much harder to dabble in fingerprinting than other forms of identity theft. If credit cards could be swiped and then authenticated with a fingerprint scan, I think we would have much less trouble with theft in that area as the technology to duplicate fingerprints doesn't seem to be widely available (how many people do you know who can do it?).

Chaosradio. It's in German though. Live streams available; topics not always interesting; GMT +1:00 with daylight saving time every last wednesday of the month @ 10pm to 1am; broadcasted by Fritz (Bluemoon); presented to you by the CCC (Chaos Computer Club).

ask some of those guys, so have experience. In the wiki you might even be able to find the info you were looking for. You'll find a lot of people to ask, anyway.

The CCC Camp 2003 was a really cool event, and i really hope there are going to be more camps like this in the future (thanks, guys!).

ask some of those guys, so have experience. In the wiki you might even be able to find the info you were looking for. You'll find a lot of people to ask, anyway.

The CCC Camp 2003 was a really cool event, and i really hope there are going to be more camps like this in the future (thanks, guys!).

Clearly you meant to say Microsoft has a backdoor into the NSA.

Well, that is true as well, but at least, the NSA knows how to firewall their backbone (at least we hope so).

Here's the link: Backdoor in MS crypto API (in german).

• Whitespace
• Java2k (mostly non-english)
• HQ9+
• Beatnik

Greetings...
hildi

The port for the CCC webserver is not 8080, but just 80.

German page

Banner

Maybe you were sitting on the internal network while you posted that :)

The port for the CCC webserver is not 8080, but just 80.

German page

Banner

Maybe you were sitting on the internal network while you posted that :)

In reaction, the german Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has called for a boycott: German Page

This banner with the motto "Industry kills Music" is especially nice. The german text at the bottom translates to "And you are surprised that things are going badly?" and was part of a recent speech at a german music price ceremony where except for one indie band only badly casted, out-of-TV and largely joke-"stars" were on stage.
Oh, and the big bosses of the german music industry were present. According to news articles, they didn't exactly like being told the truth so bluntly and on live television...

In reaction, the german Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has called for a boycott: German Page

This banner with the motto "Industry kills Music" is especially nice. The german text at the bottom translates to "And you are surprised that things are going badly?" and was part of a recent speech at a german music price ceremony where except for one indie band only badly casted, out-of-TV and largely joke-"stars" were on stage.
Oh, and the big bosses of the german music industry were present. According to news articles, they didn't exactly like being told the truth so bluntly and on live television...

the advantages rfid's as a new tech holds led to a widespread distribution in the last years. your 2-3 years time frame may hold true.

unfortunately rfid's pose a great deal of problems concerning surveillance possibilities. currently it is easy to track your reading habits. soon it will be easy to track your shopping habits.

now connect item level cloth tracking (you personally get uniquely identifieable at every rfid reader) with all the other things you could carry around which hold an rfid...

you will be running around like a radio station broadcasting all your personal habits. orwell is greeting...

there has been an interesting talk at 20c3, the
chaos communication congress about this topic. transcript available on homepage...

Chaos Communication Camp sounded more fun. Wish I could have made it.

During the 20th Chaos Congress there's also a big BlinkenArea with the Blinkenlights team and many model projects.

See BlinkenArea for more information.

We would be very pleased if you can come to visit us. But we're also planing to run a telnet-based real-time BlinkenStream and a Webcam for those who can not come.

Celebrating its 20th anniversary the Chaos Computer Club has made a special present to itself and the city of Berlin. From September 12th, 2001 to February 23rd, 2002, the famous "Haus des Lehrers" (house of the teacher) office building at Berlin Alexanderplatz has been enhanced to become world's biggest interactive computer display: Blinkenlights (a term defined by the Jargon File).

The upper eight floors of the building were transformed in to a huge display by arranging 144 front windows. A computer controlled each of the lamps independently to produce a monochrome matrix of 18 times 8 pixels.

During the night, a constantly growing number of animations could be seen. But there was an interactive component as well: you were able to play the old arcade classic Pong on the building using your mobile phone and you could place your own loveletters on the screen as well.

Blinkenlights was up and running at until February 23rd, 2002, running 23 weeks and 5 days in total. During that period, we constantly improved its feature set. Even now, work on Blinkenlights is not completed. The software has been released as Free Software under GPL. Our documentation video shows all aspects of the project in 11 minutes.

For the friends of Blinkenlights we have prepared a little trailer movie [QuickTime 5 Format, 3,2 MB] [MPEG-1 Format, 3 MB]. If you want the soundtrack of the trailer have a look here.

Overview

Using your mobile phone you could play Pong with Blinkenlights or your friend. The program Blinkenpaint enables you to create your own animations allowing you to take part in our contest.

For the nerds there is a description of the Blinkenlights Movie format and a couple of nice tools to display and convert your animations. A look behind the scenes reveals some technical details of our system.

A list of press reports about Blinkenlights und a couple of interesting links to other projects complete the overview. Get a regular update on what is going on with the project on our News page.

WebCam

Those who wanted to have a remote view on the building were able to have a look at the pictures of our webcam. The WebCam is no longer in operation. We are going to publish the WebCam picture archive here soon.

The BerlinOnline WebCam looked at Blinkenlights as well, although it was a bit more distant than our cam. Maybe you find some nice pictures in their archive as well.

Contact

Although the installation itself is now dismantled, the Blinkenlights project group is still active. Your contact for inquiries of all kinds is Tim Pritlove contact@blinkenlights.de.

If you are interested getting information on our future activities, please send a mail to blinkenlights-update-subscribe@lists.ccc.de.

Celebrating its 20th anniversary the Chaos Computer Club has made a special present to itself and the city of Berlin. From September 12th, 2001 to February 23rd, 2002, the famous "Haus des Lehrers" (house of the teacher) office building at Berlin Alexanderplatz has been enhanced to become world's biggest interactive computer display: Blinkenlights (a term defined by the Jargon File).

The upper eight floors of the building were transformed in to a huge display by arranging 144 front windows. A computer controlled each of the lamps independently to produce a monochrome matrix of 18 times 8 pixels.

During the night, a constantly growing number of animations could be seen. But there was an interactive component as well: you were able to play the old arcade classic Pong on the building using your mobile phone and you could place your own loveletters on the screen as well.

Blinkenlights was up and running at until February 23rd, 2002, running 23 weeks and 5 days in total. During that period, we constantly improved its feature set. Even now, work on Blinkenlights is not completed. The software has been released as Free Software under GPL. Our documentation video shows all aspects of the project in 11 minutes.

For the friends of Blinkenlights we have prepared a little trailer movie [QuickTime 5 Format, 3,2 MB] [MPEG-1 Format, 3 MB]. If you want the soundtrack of the trailer have a look here.

Overview

Using your mobile phone you could play Pong with Blinkenlights or your friend. The program Blinkenpaint enables you to create your own animations allowing you to take part in our contest.

For the nerds there is a description of the Blinkenlights Movie format and a couple of nice tools to display and convert your animations. A look behind the scenes reveals some technical details of our system.

A list of press reports about Blinkenlights und a couple of interesting links to other projects complete the overview. Get a regular update on what is going on with the project on our News page.

WebCam

Those who wanted to have a remote view on the building were able to have a look at the pictures of our webcam. The WebCam is no longer in operation. We are going to publish the WebCam picture archive here soon.

The BerlinOnline WebCam looked at Blinkenlights as well, although it was a bit more distant than our cam. Maybe you find some nice pictures in their archive as well.

Contact

Although the installation itself is now dismantled, the Blinkenlights project group is still active. Your contact for inquiries of all kinds is Tim Pritlove contact@blinkenlights.de.

If you are interested getting information on our future activities, please send a mail to blinkenlights-update-subscribe@lists.ccc.de.

Celebrating its 20th anniversary the Chaos Computer Club has made a special present to itself and the city of Berlin. From September 12th, 2001 to February 23rd, 2002, the famous "Haus des Lehrers" (house of the teacher) office building at Berlin Alexanderplatz has been enhanced to become world's biggest interactive computer display: Blinkenlights (a term defined by the Jargon File).

The upper eight floors of the building were transformed in to a huge display by arranging 144 front windows. A computer controlled each of the lamps independently to produce a monochrome matrix of 18 times 8 pixels.

During the night, a constantly growing number of animations could be seen. But there was an interactive component as well: you were able to play the old arcade classic Pong on the building using your mobile phone and you could place your own loveletters on the screen as well.

Blinkenlights was up and running at until February 23rd, 2002, running 23 weeks and 5 days in total. During that period, we constantly improved its feature set. Even now, work on Blinkenlights is not completed. The software has been released as Free Software under GPL. Our documentation video shows all aspects of the project in 11 minutes.

For the friends of Blinkenlights we have prepared a little trailer movie [QuickTime 5 Format, 3,2 MB] [MPEG-1 Format, 3 MB]. If you want the soundtrack of the trailer have a look here.

Overview

Using your mobile phone you could play Pong with Blinkenlights or your friend. The program Blinkenpaint enables you to create your own animations allowing you to take part in our contest.

For the nerds there is a description of the Blinkenlights Movie format and a couple of nice tools to display and convert your animations. A look behind the scenes reveals some technical details of our system.

A list of press reports about Blinkenlights und a couple of interesting links to other projects complete the overview. Get a regular update on what is going on with the project on our News page.

WebCam

Those who wanted to have a remote view on the building were able to have a look at the pictures of our webcam. The WebCam is no longer in operation. We are going to publish the WebCam picture archive here soon.

The BerlinOnline WebCam looked at Blinkenlights as well, although it was a bit more distant than our cam. Maybe you find some nice pictures in their archive as well.

Contact

Although the installation itself is now dismantled, the Blinkenlights project group is still active. Your contact for inquiries of all kinds is Tim Pritlove contact@blinkenlights.de.

If you are interested getting information on our future activities, please send a mail to blinkenlights-update-subscribe@lists.ccc.de.

If you already have the christmas lights, this is the right one for you.

See here if you want blinkenlights for your desktop computer.

Yes, and one of the owners of that company and co-developer of that phone is Andy Mueller-Maguhn, speaker of the German chaos computer club (ccc) and until recent one of the elected ICANN directors.

There is some more info in German at heise

The other reason was SuSE and Mandrake, both European and not from the United States.

SuSE and Mandrake are produced by European vendors, but the software they ship is truly international.

However you're right: a strong selling point in convincing the public sector in EU-land to switch to Linux is that revenues will flow back into the EU rather than outside.

Another important point is that the US are being currently perceived in large parts of Europe, but also in many third world countries as, how should I put it, acting rather strangely w.r.t. human rights and abidance by [intl.] laws. Please don't get me wrong here: this is not my personal opinion, but it is very widespread out there.

The general scepticism against US policy translates in (most often) irrational fears about "spyware." M$ had presumably a record of cooperating with the NSA, helping them install backdoors in M$'s crypto libraries: CCC press release (sorry, only in german). It may be true or not, the result is that people, especially outside the US, feal uneasy about installing software from companies they don't trust, which obey a government they may not always agree with.

China is a good example of this, with their RedLinux. Then again, their government won't even trust "european" distros, so they forked their own project. Then again, why not?

Last but not least, the most important aspect is simply technical excellence, or at least availability. Consider the use of FreeBSD among ISPs worldwide: there is no noticeable difference by region, and we're not afraid to use this system, even if it originated from Berkeley :). For the job at hand, there is simply no alternative; and it's fun to use too. The same about Cisco: We wouldn't dream of using something else in our backbones, just because we could find a small european router manufacturer. There is no reasonable technical alternative out there, and we're happy with our routers as they are.

photo here

using Linux detergent box for Boxen

Another boxen photo

Trademark S/N 75735641

Status page for MS-Linux trademark, [hint, someone pick it up quick!]

The page with information about the bluetooth tracker is here.

Chaos camp is currently happening in a field near Berlin. There are about 10 monitoring points around the campsite, when someone wanders past with a bluetooth phone in their pocket it is logged on a webpage. The type of bluetooth device is shown along with the device name such as "Jim's ph0wn" or "Nokia 789" This uses off the shelf bluetooth dongles. The potential for tracking people is obvious as is the potential for setting up an early warning system to detect your boss comes through the front door.

Chaos camp has a 155Mbit link via a microwave dish on hydraulic tower mounted on a truck. The camp seems to have fallen off the internet at the moment, a kid has probably single handedly DoSed the entire LAN again. I can't link to the bluetooth tracker page just now.

Chaos camp is currently happening in a field near Berlin. There are about 10 monitoring points around the campsite, when someone wanders past with a bluetooth phone in their pocket it is logged on a webpage. The type of bluetooth device is shown along with the device name such as "Jim's ph0wn" or "Nokia 789" This uses off the shelf bluetooth dongles. The potential for tracking people is obvious as is the potential for setting up an early warning system to detect your boss comes through the front door.

Chaos camp has a 155Mbit link via a microwave dish on hydraulic tower mounted on a truck. The camp seems to have fallen off the internet at the moment, a kid has probably single handedly DoSed the entire LAN again. I can't link to the bluetooth tracker page just now.

From the viedo page:
"All videos are made at the field back of my house in Bielefeld, Germany."

This is clearly a hoax. Everybody knows that Bielefeld does not exist. But THEY want to make us believe that it does exist.

Obviously they choose to use advanced tactics to make us believe it exists. But THEY can't fool me ;-P

It looks to me like this is another attempt by THEM to distract the public from Bielefeld, the German city that does not exist.

You've got it backwards. The CCC offers HTTPS for a reason. The article should read:

"From 07.-10. August, we from the Chaos Computer Club have another Chaos Communication Camp. Please be sure to visit us at the BlinkenArea, a place where we show the newest projects and technology derived of Blinkenlights, the famous installation on Berlin's 'House of the Teacher'."

You've got it backwards. The CCC offers HTTPS for a reason. The article should read:

"From 07.-10. August, we from the Chaos Computer Club have another Chaos Communication Camp. Please be sure to visit us at the BlinkenArea, a place where we show the newest projects and technology derived of Blinkenlights, the famous installation on Berlin's 'House of the Teacher'."

You've got it backwards. The CCC offers HTTPS for a reason. The article should read:

"From 07.-10. August, we from the Chaos Computer Club have another Chaos Communication Camp. Please be sure to visit us at the BlinkenArea, a place where we show the newest projects and technology derived of Blinkenlights, the famous installation on Berlin's 'House of the Teacher'."

You've got it backwards. The CCC offers HTTPS for a reason. The article should read:

"From 07.-10. August, we from the Chaos Computer Club have another Chaos Communication Camp. Please be sure to visit us at the BlinkenArea, a place where we show the newest projects and technology derived of Blinkenlights, the famous installation on Berlin's 'House of the Teacher'."

BlinkenArea

Build Blinkenlights on your school building or a nearby tower of your choice. The Chaos Computer Club did it, why not YOU? (The tools are GPL)

WDR (Radio+Television), WDR, Heise Newsticker, Bezirksregierung Düsseldorf (Regional Government), Chaos Computer Club Duesseldorf (many more links), CCC's anti censorship tutorial (and more links)

There are protests, but the regional government has chosen its first targets wisely: Only nazi sites are to be blocked even though the law applies to a much wider range of content (The law doesn't really afford this censorship in my opinion, but if one thinks it can be used against nazi sites, then it could also be used against many other sites.) Since there is a broad consensus against nazis, protesters are easily discredited as nazi sympathizers.

WDR (Radio+Television), WDR, Heise Newsticker, Bezirksregierung Düsseldorf (Regional Government), Chaos Computer Club Duesseldorf (many more links), CCC's anti censorship tutorial (and more links)

There are protests, but the regional government has chosen its first targets wisely: Only nazi sites are to be blocked even though the law applies to a much wider range of content (The law doesn't really afford this censorship in my opinion, but if one thinks it can be used against nazi sites, then it could also be used against many other sites.) Since there is a broad consensus against nazis, protesters are easily discredited as nazi sympathizers.

A mirror of the document is here.

And here is the master thesis of Tom Knight, describing the architecture of the Lisp Machine. If you want to see one in action, visit me on the Chaos Communication Camp.

One online Symbolics Lisp Machine museum is here.

And yes, UNIX royally sucks. It plays in the same suckage leage as Windows, of course, but still it sucks. It's a clone of technologies of the early 70ies, and a bad one.

Yes, it's the good old Chaos Computer Club, playing the game for more 20 years. He's well respected in Germany and the annual CCC-Congress draws a crowd of thousand. You might want to take a look at the speakers-list and lectures of last years conference at: http://www.ccc.de/congress/2002/fahrplan/speakers. en.html

and an interesting piece from wired (1998):
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,17050,00. html">

and they make cool t-shirts,too!

Security related topics have great influence on the way we work and play with computers and security is a very active field of development, which makes it both interesting and important. For more information, take a look at how the CCC defines itself:

http://www.ccc.de/faq

Q: What is the CCC?

A: The CCC is a galactic community of human beings including all ages, genders, races and social positions. We demand freedom and flow of information without censorship. Although we enjoy to discuss and analyze recent advances in information technology, our focus is on addressing the issues of our time by giving targeted recommendations for a public policy able to deal with these issues in an intelligent manner. While this also includes more or less spectacular endeavours the focus of our work is on creating a public awareness for the need to approach issues like (e.g.) security, privacy and key escrow from a more informed, open viewpoint. If you are interested in supporting these goals, then the CCC is for you. If not, you might want to consider looking at other, more technically oriented computer clubs. We do NOT select our members on some dubious "elite" criteria. As it will be difficult for you to contribute to our efforts in Germany, in case that you are interested I suggest that you contact us again (identifying yourself with your real name) for a contact at the CCC-Bay Area (our only overseas operation so far). Sorry, the rest of this FAQ is in German only. If you'd like to translate this stuff, please mail!