Friday, November 16, 2007

Delivery of My DefCon Videos ISO Promise

Finally, the 10 synchronized DVD-ROM ISOs with all the 125 video and audio recordings of the DefCon 15 educational sessions and panels (price point $499) are now up on the internet.

You can find the ten ISOs on Usenet, but I hope that they will find their way into torrent search engines and FTP servers around the internet

Below are links to the .NZB files to retrieve the Usenet posts and .SFV (simple file verification) files that include the CRC32 checksums to verify the integrity of the files.

The ISO’s are distributed as RAR archives in 50 MB size chunks and the zipped with NFO file and FILE_ID.DIZ.

NZB Files: ISO01 - ISO02 - ISO03 - ISO04 - ISO05 - ISO06 - ISO07 - ISO08 - ISO09 - ISO10

SFV Files: ISO01 - ISO02 - ISO03 - ISO04 - ISO05 - ISO06 - ISO07 - ISO08 - ISO09 - ISO10

... or download all 20 NZB and SFV files as ZIP archive.

I already apologized for this late delivery, but I explained the reasons for the delay in a previous blog post.

I put up the audio files one week ago at MediaFire. I just tried to access the files and they are gone, so is my account and other files, like the SACtro videos. Attempting to create a new account returns a vague error message. I contacted support to find out what the heck is going on. The audio files are still available at my backup location at SendSpace (where I pay money for it, so appreciate it).

Just as a reminder, all videos from the DefCon 15 hacker conference, held in August this year at the Riviera hotel and casino are already available for a few months at Google Video. See my blog post from early September that contains a listing of all the DefCon 15 presentation videos.

So, I consider now my promise to be fulfilled. It took a bit longer that you and I expected, but better late than never, right? The guys who flaked out on me maybe will also deliver what they promised eventually, beyond the partial fulfillment that at least one of the guys was able to provide.

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Quick Update 11/17/2007: MediaFire is up and okay again. Files (DefCon 15 audio recordings among others) were not lost and are accessible again via this URL.

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

DefCon 15 Video DVD-ROM ISOs and Audios Update

I mentioned in my first post to the DefCon 15 video uploads to Google Video that I are looking into getting the DVD-ROM ISOs up on the Internet and that I was looking for a better location for the audio recordings of the sessions.

So far did I only had partial success with all that. I sent the ISOs once as physical copy and also once via FTP to two different people who promised to make them available online.

One of the two people didn't do anything yet as far as I can tell and the other one fulfilled his promise only to 60% by only putting 6 of the 10 disks in ISO format online. Here is the link to the six DefCon 15 Video DVD-Rom ISOs. It's a start, but I am not very happy with the development so far.

I had more luck with finding a better location for the audio files, 123 of them and a total of 1.3 GB in size. I made the DefCon 15 Audios available for download at Mediafire.com, which allows me to share the files there for free. Sendspace charged me for that and everybody who downloaded from there can thank me for paying the bill for them.

I apologize to everybody who hoped for more than that, but it is all I can deliver at the moment. It wasn't all just up to me and I wanted to share at least this partical success with everybody who is still waiting for it.

I hope to be able to provide some final good news eventually. I am still working on it and did not give up on the idea yet. Keep in hanging there.

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Sunday, November 04, 2007

Ich bin ein Berliner

I did some historic research when I came across the famous John F. Kennedy speech in West Berlin from June 26, 1963 again where JFK said “Ich bin ein Berliner”.

I also came across a video that was supposed to be "funny".

However, the video is not, because the whole premise the joke is based on is wrong. In addition, the StumbleUpon flags for some of the normal video links showed as category "humor".



I did not understand what "funny" incident he referred to when somebody asked me about this "running joke" for the first time several years back.

I learned then what obviously caused the amusement by some people. I do not know where they got the info from, but that somebody did probably not like JFK (I suspect Republican mischief here).

May be even a German from somewhere else in Germany than Berlin, who does not like Berlin (I suspect a Bavarian here, because Bavarians and Prussians have a long history of not liking each other). A Bavarian Republican would fit the profile perfectly. Ouch, there are a lot of them, because by a twist of fate are the majority of Bavarians very conservative.

Okay, I was just kidding regarding the suspicion of Republicans or Bavarians, but the fact is that somebody got it all wrong and that wrong information found its way through the heads of many Americans to this date.

Now let me clarify and bust this urban myth about what JFK said and what he meant.

"Ich bin ein Berliner" means, "I am a Berliner", which is understood in Berlin at least as "I am a guy from Berlin" and not "I am a stupid filled donut".

I think that I am an authority on that as somebody who was born and raised in Berlin, Germany who lived there the first 25 years of my life.

The filled donut others call a "Berliner" are the Berliner calling a "Pfannkuchen". "Pfannkuchen" is for others what you call "pan cakes" in English. The Berliner calls "pan cakes" "Eierkuchen", which translates to "egg cake(s)". Why is that? I do not know, I guess nobody likes to be called a food, especially a food that is a desert and soft and ... sissy. You know what I mean.

The Wiener, which is somebody from Vienna, also does not call the sausage we in Berlin call a "Wiener" that way. I do not know what they call it, maybe they call it "Frankfurter" and I am sure that this is not what the Frankfurter calls it (I think they also call it "Wiener").

Furthermore, use your brains. If JFK would have made a mistake, said it wrong, and embarrassed himself, what would the reaction of the crowd have been? Silence? Maybe, Laughter? Also possible. Cheer and Applause? Very unlikely.

Videos like this one are absolutely unnecessary and the stupid person who did it should be ashamed of himself.



I hope this settles this.
Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC and yes, Ich bin auch ein Berliner!