Maybe it's not as great as working for Google, but it comes close: I got a job at the "Computers and Society " department of the computer science faculty at the TU Berlin :-)

My main task will be administrative work, teaching and to some limited extent, research. For those who know this department, it's no surprise: The teamwork here is great, everyone is throwing around ideas and gives input for the work of the colleagues. Labour times are highly flexible (as long as no students are involved) and I finally have the chance to put the center of my living to the university. The first thing I did was fridge.addItem("UHT-Milk"); because everyone else here seems to drink his coffee black, but I need milk ;-)

All I now need is a good laptop to work effectively. I'm thinking about buying a ThinkPad T-something but they are everything but cheap. Let's see if I can figure something out for this problem ... but probably I'll end up buying a brand new one :-)

So - the next conference. But this time I'm not really taking part. The European Computer Science Summit (3rd Annual Informatics Europe Meeting 2007) takes place in our university. I used the oportunity to hear some of the talks. The opening keynote from Jeannette M. Wing (Carnegie Mellon University, NSF) was quite inspiring - her vision was, that computational thinking should tought in basic education (K12) and find it's way into every other science. Computer Science has something to give for other sciences and this is basically the idea behind "Informatik und Gesellschaft" at the TU-Berlin. "Exciting times for Computer Science".

Thomas Hofmann (Google) had a noteworthy keynote about innovation at Google and the differrence that huge amounts of data can make to your practice and theory. I'll probably not make it to the other talks tomorrow, since there are some internal talks at my university chair and some things to organize for the freshmens first week :)

Wow, what a week.

Last week the 2nd European Trusted Infrastructure Summer School (ETISS) 2007 at Ruhr-University Bochum took place and I had the opportunity to take part as a sponsored student. The summerschool is about Trusted Computing and not only computing but everything else that is influenced by it (eg. mobiles). We had a full schedule from 8 am to 8 pm from saturday to friday and in the end it nearly became exhaustive. But it was very worth it. Many inspiring people, especially Graeme Proudler (HP) from the TCG Technical Workgroup, as well as Boris Balacheff (HP), David Grawrock (Intel) and many more were there. Paul England (Microsoft) had a very good keynote (at least in my opinion, and I was kind of sceptic beforehand). I took part in the "Trusted Computing Application to e-Commerce Security" workshop from Shane Balfe (Royal Holloway University of London) and the "Research questions for Mobile Trusted Modules" from Jan-Erik Ekberg (Nokia Research) and Kurt Dietrich (TU Graz) but was merely a listener then a contributer.

Lots of stuff learned, thank you Ruhr-Uni Bochum! 

I recently stumbled upon a nice note one of the security mailinglists I'm reading. Botnets, huge networks of computers infected with trojan horses/worms can be used for DDoS attacks and spam sending. These uses are known and a big threat already. But the nodes do not only have an internet connection, but also a CPU and RAM (not to speak of harddisks) which could be put into good use by the "owners". Kinda cute (and dangerous) idea, I think :)

Peter Gutmann (Department of Computer Science, University of Auckland) makes a quick calculation using some statistics from the Valve Steam service and the known or estimated size of the biggest botnet and comes to the conclusion that this network could easily beat the Top500 computers. 

I got an Alto-Saxophone from my sweet cousin Heidrun. Played around with the thought of learning sax for quite some time already and *poof* there is my chance and the starting point :)

I'm somewhat excited at the moment - let's see what happens in the next ... erm ... years.

(I allready got it to play half of a scale, i think) 

(thank you heidi!) 

Yay! We have a new server box for the Freitagsrunde running. One of us had it lying around, dead, at his workplace. It turned out, that the PSU was broken. We had to solder it manually and it actually worked :)

The next thing was the RAM: It had 768MB of SD-RAM in three sticks of which only one worked. The others were broken as well, most likely they died together with the PSU. So we bought 2x512MB new SD-RAM which are getting tested at the moment, but they seem to work fine :)

In the meantime we're allready playing around with a test-machine. We're using Debian Etch 4.0 and set up a Xen solution with software raid and LVM support so we can easily resize partitions and swap out the hard disk drives.  The next step is software - centralized authentication and authorization with LDAP for most applications will not be so easy.

This was a lot of brain-work. Yesterday we finished our paper "Information Security und freie Mitarbeiter - ein Widerspruch?". It deals with the problem of information security when a company hires freelancers. We chose an economic theory to get to the roots of these problems. The Principal-Agent Model gives a lot of explanations why humans show "good" or "bad" behaviour. Although this is quite a sad model, because it assumes completly selfish behaviour, it's fail-proof, gives answers and provides solutions.

Other than that, I took part in the final test for the course "Grundlagen der Informationsmodellierung". It went pretty good, I finished in time and am confident that the result will be decent. Next week -- two more tests ... *goes off learning*

I just got to know today, that Martin defends his Diplom-thesis . He and his mate wrote a quite impressive report of about 300 pages O_O

The title of their work is "Filesharing is inevitable", which refers to the famous paper from Slater and Benis "Democracy is inevitable" (google scholar). I just went over to the meeting room and took a seat between the staff. Because I just hapened to have read said paper the day before and the topic their work is about is exactly my favorite topic, I really enjoyed the presentation :-)

Slater and Benis have been right, in the end, let's hope Häcker and Janson are, too.