llongi's blog

Got back from Berlin on Sunday evening, this time the train was only five minutes late, so I got on the connecting trains just fine.
Looking back at my stay in Berlin: 27C3 was great (read the other blog posts for a summary), the hotel we stayed at, Agon am Alexanderplatz, was great too, normal prices, clean, very spacey rooms, they were in fact old apartments converted to hotel rooms, so we had a big bedroom, bathroom, and a kitchen/living room area too, great to keep drinks chilled! I definitely recommend the place.
Food in Berlin was also usually great, be it from the BCC's catering, Las Malvinas (steak-house), or Piazza Rossa (pizzeria, Italian restaurant), or other places we went to, but I wanted to mention those two in particular as they were really good and relatively cheap, at least compared to our prices here in Switzerland.
On Friday we mostly relaxed at the hotel, seeing as the weather didn't really encourage much sightseeing, and then we went to the big New Year's Eve party at the Brandenburger Tor, which was really awesome, the Hermes House Band was great ("Country Roads, take me home, to the place, I belong, West Virginia, ..." ;) ). The fireworks weren't that impressive in my opinion, I expected much more from such an event, Lugano's are both bigger and last longer, and we're just a small swiss town!
I've uploaded a few photos I took with my new digital camera.
I spent most of Saturday in bed, as I managed to catch a cold, but that's getting better now, slowly. Watched a few of the talks I didn't see at CCC on the laptop. The official recordings are now being published, so if any talk interests you, download and watch it, it's worth it.

• "Hackers and Computer Science" is really awesome, watch that one!
• "Reverse Engineering a real-world RFID payment system" was very interesting too, as was
• "Chip and PIN is Broken", both concerning the security of widely used payment systems.
• "Rootkits and Trojans on Your SAP Landscape" was kinda scary, this one is probably very interesting for any Wirtschafts-Informatik student.
• Finally managed to watch "Console Hacking 2010", which brings great news: it will soon be possible to install Linux on the PS3 again, and boot it directly.
• "Data Recovery Techniques" was a very informative talk about storage media and how and when they can be recovered in practice.
• "USB and libusb" gives a great overview of what USB is, how it works, and how to program it under Linux, really worth a viewing if you plan to do anything with USB.