Life

Last weekend I was at the Easterhegg in Stuttgart, an event organized by the Chaos Computer Club. I had a talk with the title "How broken is TLS?"

This was quite a lucky topic. I submitted the talk back in January, so I had no idea that the Heartbleed bug would turn up and raise the interest that much. However, it also made me rework large parts of the talk, because after Heartbleed I though I had to get a much broader view on the issues. The slides are here as PDF, here as LaTeX and here on Slideshare.

There's also a video recording here (media.ccc.de) and also on Youtube.

I also had a short lightning talk with some thoughs on paperless life, however it's only in German. Slides are here (PDF), here (LaTeX) and here (Slideshare). (It seems there is no video recording, if it appears later I'll add the link.)

If you don't know who I am and what I do, let me quickly introduce myself:

I live in Berlin and work as a freelance journalist. I sometimes write for the newspapers taz, the online version of the Zeit and I'm a regular author at the IT news magazine Golem.de. Currently, my main topics are IT security and cryptography. I cover those topics both for general interest media and for experts. I also write about some completely different topics like climate change, energy politics, science and problems in medicine and whatever I happen to find interesting. I maintain an extensive list of articles I wrote in the past on my website and just recently added an English version with Google Translate links to my articles.

A notable article I wrote lately was a large piece on the security of various encryption algorithms after the Snowden revelations which got around 900.000 visits. In the past days I covered the Heartbleed story extensively and am happy to say that I wrote the first article in German language that appeared on Google News.

I'm quite happy with my job right now. Especially my cooperation with Golem.de is going very well. I have enough topics to write about, have some new opportunities in sight and earn enough money from my work to pay my expenses However, all my current employers publish exclusively in German. I sometimes cover topics where I'd wish that I could target an international audience and where I'd like to publish in English language.

If you are working for any kind of media in English language and you think my work may be interesting for you: Please get in touch with me. Of course if you work for any kind of media in German language and think the same you may also get in touch with me.

I'm aware that this is difficult. Anyone who decides to cooperate with me on this needs to be aware: I'm no native speaker. I think my English language skills are decent, but they are far from perfect. My work probably requires more spell checking and editing than others.

Ich halte morgen (11.04.2014) einen Vortrag im Hackerspace AFRA in Berlin. Hier die Ankündigung:

Beliebte Webanwendungen und Content-Management-Systeme haben regelmäßig Sicherheitslücken. Nutzer müssen diese Anwendungen regelmäßig updaten, aber viele Betreiber von Webseiten sind sich dessen nicht bewusst. Im Rahmen des Betriebs von Servern mit einigen Hundert Kunden habe ich das Tool FreeWVS entwickelt, mit dem sich Webanwendungen mit bekannten Sicherheitslücken erkennen lassen. Wenn man Updates versäumt, tauchen fast zwangsweise irgendwann gehackte Webanwendungen auf. Diese aufzuspüren ist aber nicht unbedingt trivial. Wenn es zu spät ist, wird der eigene Server unter Umständen zur Spamschleuder oder wird für DDoS-Attacken missbraucht.

Beginn 20:00 Uhr, die AFRA befindet sich in der Herzbergstraße 55, nahe der Tram-Haltestelle Haltestelle Herzbergstraße/Siegfriedstraße.

Update: Die Slides gibt's hier als PDF, hier als Latex-Source und auf Slideshare.