Want to know what I did on my winter vacation? Read all about it on the Popular Science blog by visiting the following links. First, I arrived at the Chaos Communication Congress. Then I discovered that people were buying RFID tags and wearing them so that they could engage in recreational surveillance. Christine Corbett taught me about MOSES, open source software for rapid, machine translation. She endeared herself to me forever by suggesting this might be a good way to translate Finnish into Klingon. Steven Murdoch explained how to identify computers over a network based on something called clock skew, which is caused when the machine’s heat makes its clock run faster or slower.

Melanie Rieback gave a great talk on her RFID Guardian, a soon-to-be-mobile device that filters out unwanted requests from RFID readers trying to get information off the RFID chips in your passport, clothes, shoes, credit cards, and whatever else. She’s a whiz at RFID jamming, and is also prone to making goofy jokes — an excellent combination in a scientist. I described the “hacker scene” at CCC, and speculated about why computer geeks are one of the only groups of professionals whose conferences combine technical discussions with socializing as well as cultural/political analysis.

Finally, I wrote about Sebastian Wolfgarten’s exploration into how to get around the Great Firewall of China. And I gave PopSci readers four CCC-related projects to do in their spare time: hack digital TV signals, build software for the One Laptop Per Child project, turn a backpack into a wifi signal detector, and learn the logical language Lojban. It was a great conference, and my lecture there about women in technology went really well too. As soon my lecture is available in video format, I’ll post it here.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 5th, 2007 at 1:34 pm.
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