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August 03, 2004
Happy First Birthday Mercury and Apollo!
First off, today is Mercury and Apollo's first birthday. As I mentioned in earlier logs, they are our two cute little kittens. Today, they are no longer kittens, but are adults. *sniff*. I'm planning on serving them salmon with a candle on top. Happy birthday, guys!
Whew! The travel bug has struck. I was out in Honolulu and S. Korea for a business trip two weeks ago, and last week, after returning from S. Korea for four days, I flew out to attend DEFCON 12 conference.
OK, so I enjoyed Waikiki quite a bit. Too bad I was there for only one-and-a-half days. The thing was, I had to travel to both Honolulu and S. Korea in one week. That's where it got difficult. For example, it takes two days to fly to S. Korea from the States because of crossing the international date line. However, the most challenging part was the fact that I was traveling all by myself - one, I've never been to Korea, and two, I do not speak Korean. This was further compounded by the fact that EVERYONE in Korea thought I was Korean, and went ahead and spoke Korean to me anyway. So, I had to explain to everyone that I didn't speak Korean, at which point I would get puzzled looks, as people wondered whether I'm Korean anyways, even though I can't speak the language. You get the idea. Anyhow, I was glad to be home after a week of travel, at which point I got to rest for four days before flying out to Vegas for DEFCON 12.
This year, I'm a speaker at DEFCON. That was a really good opportunity for me, as I got to speak to a crowd of somewhere between 500 and 1000 folks. This is probably the largest it gets, and I'm happy that I got through it well enough. Afterwards, Franck Veysset, one of the authors of the RING timing analysis OS fingerprinting concept came up to say hi. It turns out that they had some legal issues with a company, and RING is now known as Cron-OS. Anyhow, I was thrilled to meet Franck, since he's the first author of a tool that I mention, who actually came up to talk to me after my presentation. I'm really psyched about working on incorporating Morph's timing analysis fooling technique now. I really think it's entirely possible - I just need to find the time to work on it. The projects are indeed piling up - I'm going to help out with the Cutlass effort pretty soon as well. Plus, there's a trip to Finland and Sweden coming up on my horizon. I'll talk more about those when I'm there. The hotel I'm staying at in Finland has FREE high speed Internet access. w00t!
Posted by Kathy at August 3, 2004 11:55 PM