34C3 - TUWAT - Talks - Part 5

Post date: Apr 1, 2018 7:26:33 AM

  • The Snowden Refugees under Surveillance in Hong Kong - Flashbacks, I think these are the talks which are given every year even if there wouldn't be actually anything new to add to that story.
  • Financial Surveillance - This should be quite interesting. Risk Management solutions via Risk Intelligence using profiling of heightened risk individuals and entities globally. Detecting international money laundering and terrorism funding. "World-Check.json", data structure, format description and content description. "World Check - Reducing risk through intelligence". Detecting political corruption and bribes. Data source quality was highly questionable. Proper data filtering and verification completely missing. Stale data in the database. Competing data providers: LexisNexis and Dow Jones. - Good talk, system is clearly flawed.
  • Holography of Wi-Fi radiation -. This is interesting talk, let's see how they've done it. Even if technically it should be "simple". Wi-Fi is like laser, but with longer wave length. Yep, electromagnetic radiation (they said waves, what about duality? They also mentioned Microwave Light). Also good reminded about light / photon holography. Phase-coherent recording. Wi-Fi based holography. Microwave camera, phase array, amplitude array, signal correlation. Phase delay and attenuation recorded using reference signal. Building imaging view using data from signal using numerical reconstruction and virtual focus plane. Using multiple frequencies in parallel together even more information. Spying and imaging using Wi-Fi as security attack talked a lot. Wi-Fi provides poor resolution, using dedicated Ultra-Wideband (UWB) Radar emitter is much better. Walabot mentioned. Tracking radio emitters in buildings. With higher computing power full tomography is possible. In door localization and tracking is well possible using receiver network.
  • Bulletin Board System (BBS) and early Internet access (1990's) - This is something which I don't need to listen talks about. But I still liked to listen it. Let's see if there's anything worth of commenting. I remember that I personally had problems compiling Telegrad BBS software with Turbo Pascal, because my system was running out of RAM. I guess it was the largest piece of software I ever compiled with Turbo Pascal. There were also strange problems, like "lines out" from local exchange being all full. Does it sound familiar that "uplink" is oversold? Also at one point they added DTMF support, but it was really funny, because it was only support for it. No they didn't process the DTMF signals, they had DTMF converter! So even if you used DTMF to dial the number, it actually was just as slow as using pulse dial, because there was just a module which converted that DTMF back to pulse dial. Yep, even in good old days they had all the tricks to sell you something as being more advanced than it really was. Cool the talk showed Smartmodem, (US Robotics OLD) Courier, there was also the newer Sportster and of course the legendary ZyXEL U-1496E v.32bis with v.42bis support. Nice hardware in the photos. Proprietary protocols like US Robotics HST I think it as 14,400 / 2400 bps. But it could actively renegotiate the faster link to any direction, without dropping the connection using "retrain". Some modems were able to change link speed without retrain, but most of modems couldn't do that. Talker seemed to like Telemate, I used Telemate a lot. They also mentioned TELIX. Also Terminate was popular in later times and before Telemate many used Procomm Plus. Telemate & Terminate allowed using Avatar instead of ANSI which wasted lot of bytes when changing colors, repositioning cursor etc. Telemate was nice because it allowed light co-operative 'multitasking' like reading documents while downloading files, or running shell prompt commands, etc. FIDOnet point, polling, offline messaging formats like Bluewave and QWK mentioned. All so familiar stuff. FIDO (Netmail + Echomail) later also UUCP (Usenet Mail + News). Fidonet hierarchy, Regional routing / addressing introduced in 1986. But the sample address they used didn't contain point. 2:2490/1343 but point could have been added to it with .23 which is leaf of node usually operated by an individual. Many BBSs worked as Internet gateways via shell, providing shell and slip or using slirp from shell. And Trumpet Winsocket and NCSA Mosaic of course! And this is what lead to slow but guaranteed death of BBS systems. UUencoding. No multitasking? Hmm, that's not true, we had - DESQview - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview - of course. POTS / ISDN / PCM. ISDN Terminal Adapter, 64000 bps or 128000 bps (using dual channel). Lots of talk about Internet connectivity providing regional member associations, etc. They had really nice network diagrams in the talk. DOOM mentioned. - Basically this is just like the networks in Cuba. Owned and operated by individual users whom network together.