News items for tag notablog - Koos van den Hout

After I visited earlier Dutch hacker events HEU, HIP97, HAL2001, WTH2005 I missed HAR2009, OHM2013 and SHA2017. I can only say 'life happened' because my son was born in the interim and my interests changed.

In the beginning of this year I heard about the new planning for May Contain Hackers as the original plan was for 2021 and it was postponed due to covid-19. I started thinking about attending and when the opportunity to get a free ticket arose due to my links with Surf I got serious.

Life is still happening so I coordinated with the rest of the family whether I could be missed at home and for how long. The result was that I would go Friday evening until Tuesday afternoon and I would go there by recumbent bicycle with the luggage trailer so the rest of the family could use the car.

The people from Surf set up our own village Village:SMRF next to Village:OS3. I slept in my own tent because I really want my rest at night and I want that rest at a somewhat normal schedule (not really a hacker schedule). I brought a 1-person tent, a sleeping bag, clothes, gear to make breakfast with tea and coffee, a smartphone with charger and a handheld radio with charger. Having to move all my luggage myself on the recumbent bicycle made me very selective in what to bring.

I went to several talks spoke a number of well-known people, got to know new ones, saw people there I didn't expect and had a good time.

What I really enjoyed was the friendly atmosphere. One aspect of that caught my attention: besides people with non-traditional clothing and hairstyles I saw several people who looked like they were somewhere in a gender transitioning process. They felt free at MCH to be themselves. One person responded to me when I shared this observation: "I saw more LGTB flags here than at Pride in Amsterdam".

Also MCH was really non-commercial. Mentions of the sponsors were minimal and never in-your-face.

The weather cooperated a lot! It might have been quite different with bad weather. There was some rain before Friday so I saw mentions of "Mud Contains Hackers" on twitter. Saturday and Sunday were hot, Monday was cooler. Tuesday started with rain and some more showers, so my tent wasn't completely dry when I packed.

Cycling the 45 kilometers was fine. I used google maps for navigation (but with the smartphone not visible, just the instructions on my earbuds). I had to stop several times to check the screen to check the instructions and sometimes google came up with weird things. I had it set up for cycle navigation but it still said to take three-quarters of a roundabout to go left while the roundabout allowed me to go from one cycling path on the left of the road to the other. It took me about 2 hours 45 minutes including stops for navigating and stops for drinking, eating and adding some water to nearby trees.

All in all I had a great time. I had my moment of "I am getting too old for this" but that faded and I really enjoyed myself.

List of talks I attended, with links to the place to view it online:

• Everything is an input device (fun with barcodes)
• Honey, let's hack the kitchen: attacks on critical and not-so-critical cyber physical systems
• Radio Amateurism via commercial satelite (no video available), workshop with a demo of the QO-100 broadband transponder
• A Brief History of Automotive Insecurities
• Hacking COVID: Hackers helping the government
• Finding 0days in Enterprise Web Applications
• Audio networks and their security implications
• drand: publicly verifiable randomness explained
• The War in Ukraine: Cyberfront
• Cyber crises and what you can do to face the challenge
• Around the world in 80 networks, Hacking Universities Worldwide. ( ...lessons learned at age 15. ) - Rob Coleman (no video available)
• Payment terminals as general purpose (game-)computers
• A Smart Light Hacking Journey
• Sensor.Community - Global Open Environmental Data Platform
• How do GPS/Galileo really work & how the galmon.eu monitors all navigation satellites

De overstap naar Freedom internet is gelukt. De verbinding met xs4all verbrak om 04:56:30 en om 04:56:46 was de verbinding weer gemaakt met Freedom Internet met de nieuwe IPv6 en IPv4 adressen.

De overschakeling was daarna een kwestie van alle configuraties die ik had klaarstaan activeren en statische IPv6 thuis adressen omnummeren. Daarna nog een paar kleine dingetjes die ik vergeten was maar niets storends.

Volgens een volgende aankondiging van xs4all gebruikte ik ook nog addressen met een plus er in voor kzdoos.xs4all.nl. Het was even zoeken en uiteindelijk bleken die inderdaad in de spambox voor te komen omdat ik lang geleden een + adres gebruikte in usenet postings. Maar spammers vergeten nooit een oud adres, zie Bitcoin extortion spam showing up on different e-mail addresses.

Na alle ontwikkelingen bij xs4all was het tijd om de overstap te maken die er al een tijd inzat. Van xs4all naar Freedom internet met eigenlijk dezelfde voor mij belangrijke eigenschappen: een vast IPv4 adres, een vaste IPv6 reeks en een provider die geeft om belangrijke zaken zoals privacy.

De snelheid gaat er wat op vooruit: freedom levert de snelheid die de DSL verbinding aan kan, dus in ons geval 101 mbit down/30 up.

Direct na de aanvraag en het accepteren van de automatische incasso krijg ik al gelijk bericht wat het IPv4 adres wordt en de toegekende IPv6 reeks. Dat is handig, dan kan ik de overstap goed voorbereiden.

Vandaag de aankondiging die ik twee jaar geleden al voorzag:

Per 1 oktober 2021 vervalt batched SMTP op kzdoos.xs4all.nl

Het omzetten van e-mail adressen lukt vrij goed. Het meeste wat nog op oude adressen binnenkomt is spam.

De instructie die XS4ALL geeft om dit op te lossen op Batched SMTP op subdomein vervalt - xs4all is vrij simpel. In de mail stond Op xs4all.nl/bsmtp staat hoe u kunt zien op welke adressen u berichten heeft ontvangen en wat u in Mijn XS4ALL moet doen. maar op die site komt het neer op 'zoek in je eigen mailarchieven' en niet 'na authenticatie kunt u zien wat er voor u in de maillogs bij ons staat' wat mijn eerste verwachting was.

Het is jammer, maar met alle wijzigingen bij XS4ALL naar KPN niet onverwacht. Voor mij wel een signaal dat het tijd is om op te gaan stappen als klant bij XS4ALL.

For a while I had a notification set for someone selling a morse paddle. Finally one came along at a reasonable price so I bought it.

And.. I mentioned this detail to some people at work. Who had an idea of what a morse key is, but didn't know about morse paddles. So with my big mouth I said "I'll make a video about it". This was triggered by the fact that I recently learned about OpenShot non-linear video editor which is available for Linux too.

So I created a video. And found out making a video of 30 seconds is a lot more work than 30 seconds. I watched some tutorial videos about OpenShot first and thought about what I wanted to show. I haven't added spoken comments because I didn't feel like doing those too.

The video isn't great, I can see several beginner mistakes. But I get the point across of what a paddle does. There is a continuity problem because I used sunlight. Which isn't very constant. And I made several clips because I didn't think I would get everything I wanted to show right. But now there are changes in light and a bit in camera angle, even with using a tripod.

And our neighbours were busy hammering indoors, so that can be heard too.

It's the christmas holiday and that gives me some time to fix things that have been on the wishlist for a while. This includes some parts of the scripts that make up my homepage.

The update was a learning process, I found out getting caching right is still very hard and I learned about preformatted text and the CSS grid which worked differently than expected. All fixed now.

This is now fixed, and I may find more things to fix in the (near) future.

Changes include:

• The pages are now using a CSS grid
• Pages have a usable righthandside
• Updates to the footer have been made on all pages
• The history function of the newstag page has been fixed to give usable permanent urls
• The IPv6 check is active on more pages

I found out the mobile version of my homepage was a lot wider than the desktop version (which tries to fit on the screen). This didn't show when I learned about the CSS grid for Camp Wireless.

The difference is that my homepage regularly uses log samples which are displayed as preformatted text. I used the grid width 1fr which allows for the full width of <pre> items. Changing this to 100% fixed it. The desktop version uses two columns and those are already split using percentages of the full screen width.

I haven't written anything about wardriving since I noticed I fell out of the WiGLE top 100 but I still do it from time to time. At the same rate as I wrote back then, switching on the WiGLE app on an Android phone when I realize I may be in an 'interesting' area for finding networks and I have the time. I don't go out on wardriving trips on purpose, but there are enough networks to be found.

By now I have dropped to the number 312 rank in the WiGLE user statistics. I guess there are other wardrivers a lot more active and plotting every day wardriving expeditions.

WiGLE also logs found bluetooth devices and there are a lot of those out there.

After switching my websites to https I found out caching works differently on https (for good reasons) and files included by lots of pages got reloaded a lot.

So I added some caching hints. I especially did not want the stylesheet to be reloaded constantly. So I added an ExpiresByType directive to cache stylesheets for a week.

But on the change of camp-wireless to a new stylesheet and programming language I got bitten by this: some browsers had the old css code cached and saw no reason to check for updates. The site looked strange (but wasn't really broken).

I recently made some changes to parts of my homepage too, also going to the CSS grid model, just like the changes in Camp Wireless to the CSS grid model. And I had the same problems with the CSS in the production version. It took a bit of searching to find the source of the Expires statement, it was in the .htaccess file.

Now fixed to a much shorter cache time, it is quite possible to have versions of the pagecode and CSS differ in the browser.