weather
On the weather
Basra Snow Storm
I was feeling a little left out, reading posts by people digging out of snow storms and here I am in Basra where it gets down to 10C at night sometimes and usually hits the mid 20’s during the day. Rough. But the weather here came through with our own sort of snow storm.
Starting to look like a brown-out!
Obligatory shot of the yard furniture getting covered.
Kitty’s head is starting to show some accumulation.
With all this blowing through you can barely see a few hundred meters!
It’s really starting to accumulate. Where’s the snow blower?
It takes some special cleaning after playing out in it.
The Southern Iraqi Desert
The desert just north of Basra is beautifully empty.
54C
New experience today – 129+F Wikipedia says the highest temperature recorded in Basra was 52C. Now the car was driving over a sunlit road, so it was recording a higher temperature than you would see over shaded ground, but it is only May.
Summer is going to be fun.
Central Park in the Snow
Snow falling on Central Park from the 24th floor.
Snowmaggeddon
a snowy arrival in BOS
But not exactly snowmaggeddon. By the time we got there it was easy to get around.
Rain, in LA? In May?
What next? Cats and dogs sleeping toghether?
Oh Canada
A little northern snow in the great white north.
26c3 Berlin
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.
