What The Hack Day 1

"What the Hack" started off very nicely.
Power and Internet connectivity were quickly
provided to the tents and made water-proof
in a hurry once a thunderstorm started
yesterday evening. I wish I had a digital
camera, as the lightnings have been very
impressive. The quality of the talks so far
was very good. There was a talk of a bio
scientist from Cambrigde, UK, who demonstrated
"Cyborgs: Practicai Experimentation". As of
today it possible to build devices that
allows paraphlegics to control wheel chairs
with neural commands and he showed a video
of remote controlled mice. They also
experimented with remote control over the
internet, pretty scary to see someone's
arm controlled by someone from the other
side of the ocean.

Also, there has been a talk of a crypto
guy that analysed the security of the new
digital European passports. The initial
key strength requires 35 years of brute
forcing on a standard PC, but they discovered
that one digit is a checksum that be easily
be computed after the attack and some other
patterns about the expiry, which in total
reduced the required computational time down
to two hours...
Yesterdays's final talk was from John
Gilmore, the 70s US hacker legend, who now
focuses on funding research on the medical
benefits of psychedelic drugs, which was
entertaining from a presentational point
of view, as he was obviously under the
influence when giving his talk.