26c3 was a blast, as was Berlin. It’s a good conference in the olde school hacker style: mostly younger people, mostly wearing black. There weren’t a lot of women, but Carolyn, Isabella, and Meredith tried to even out the ratio a bit.
Some of the best lectures included one by some German engineers working on the lunar x-prize. They had their prototype rover with them and gave a great talk about the various challenges.
Another great one was Dan Kaminski’s talk on PKI. I don’t agree with the premise that SSL should be a reliable method for identifying the owners of websites as people just can’t tell the difference between bankofamerica.com and bancomerica.com and so it doesn’t make anyone safer if the bankofamerica site is super green if bancomerica.com is also super green, and so the complexities of getting an accepted certificate simply reduce the use of secure connections and the overall security of the internet. But he had some pretty great attacks on the security of SSL that causes problems no matter what.
We enjoyed fuzzing the phone as well. It was a very entertaining talk on attacking phones with crafted SMSes. The method of creating the attacks was very clever – rooting the phone, redirecting the radio to a wifi link to a CPU so they could try zillions of SMS and see what would happen. In the process they discovered they could remotely root the communications manager (which runs as root). And %n to specific windows phones and they’ll crash and fail to reboot until the SMS is cleared out of the inbox.
Berlin is a great city and it was fun working in the shadow of the TV tower.
We made reservations for lunch but we could tell it wasn’t going to be a great day. In the end it was a very intimate lunch with pretty clouds pressing against the glass.
The fog lifted but was replaced by snow, which is a lot of fun in a city when you don’t have to drive.
Instamapper.com has a pretty cool solution. Nothing radically novel in concept, but it does pretty much just work and with most devices with a GPS.
It’s a little different from Google Latitude, which has a social aspect (your friends) but no history. Latitude is built into Google Maps Mobile 3.0, so everyone will have this on their phone in a few days. That’ll be weird fur sure.
Amazingly I downloaded this app this morning at 3.0.0, by the time I’d told a friend about it the release was 3.0.1, and the last person I told got 3.0.2. I guess Google is excited about this one.
Or why I hate bar phones.
Ass Dialing is when you have a bar phone in your pocket, bend over, and accidentally dial either the last call or something out of your phone book.
My two best ass dialing stories:
1) I had an old qualcomm spoonphone – the early bar phone with the round end with the speaker in it. Very flat and strong. I carried it in my back pocket. I had lunch with this bodybuilder woman I flirted with and she was sitting with her panties exposed. They became a topic of conversation… a conversation my then girlfriend overhead after I ass dialed her. I wasn’t even doing anything with the woman, just flirting, but boy was that embarrassing.
2) Carolyn’s best high school friend is a gay playwright. He wrote most of the plays she did for a long time, and loves to blow straight guys. Before he moved next to the Marine base and had an infinite supply of buff “straight” guys looking for a BJ he had to search for straight guys to blow at porn theaters. One time Carolyn went to pick him up at some porn theater after he was done and ass dialed me. It’s her phone number on the caller ID but all I hear is uh uh uh oh yes oh yesss uh uh uh.
Certainly the best ass-dial I’ve ever gotten. I hate it when someone ass dials me over and over. They’re running through an airport and every time they shift their bag they ass dial again. Another friend kept ass dialing 911.
Me, I don’t ass dial any more. I stick to flip phones.
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Pearl parts
If you have a blackberry pearl and you work near metal dust or filings it will not last long.
I took mine to SRL yesterday and needed to use it with dirty hands. I wiped them off on my shirt, really, then used it a few times and noticed that the trackball had stopped running smoothly. The problem is not just the dirt (see the black streaks around the knurls on the little potato masher shafts), but metal flakes that stick to the magnets.
Turns out the blackberry’s trackball works with four little hall effect sensors on the mother board (you can see one of the black sensors in the top right of the cavity where the trackball was). The black ends of the four little (TINY) potato mashers are magnets and attracts dirt… and tools.. and make them endo and stick to things in very annoying ways as you try to reassemble the trackball. If you get a metal flake wedged between the sensor and the magnet cylinder as you roll the cylinder past it you draw nice metal residue rings around the black magnet, which do not come off easily (but fortunately do not affect operation).
Cleaning each bit carefully with rubbing alcohol, blowing out the cavity and the magnets, and particularly working on a strip of tacky paper (like painter’s masking tape) makes it possible to clean the parts and get the little metal bits off. The pearl itself is very likely to make a break for it across any gradient. It’s only 3.5mm in diameter; do not lose it.
These instructions helped. Basically pry the silver ring off gently from the front (under the 2/t/y key) and pop the trackball assembly out. Mine did not have the second metal retaining ring in it and seems to work fine without it.
All back together now, but it will not be accompanying me into environments with metal dust and chips as the sensor is perfectly designed to draw them into the workings and specifically right to where they will jam the rollers. It does seem fairly immune to finger grease and pocket lint though.
Map It
