Wifi at Changi Airport

I just checked out the free internet terminals in Changi Airport. Few of them run secured version of Internet Explorer. I was also able to use "Wireless@SG", the free island wide wireless at Changi. The speed was amazing. I had to download JavaDoc for JDK 1.5. It completed in 12 minutes. If you are not aware, JavaDoc for JDK 1.5 is 150MB.

IT Security Awareness Day 2007 at Singapore Poly

I gave a talk on WebSecurity at Singapore Poly at the IT Security Awareness Day Event. Around 300 students attended the event, and most of them were school kids. I mostly spoke about Johnny's Google Hacking Database, and little bit about XSS. Justin Lister from InterSect Singapore also spoke at the event. He organized a simple game to explain Phishing. Thanks to Samson, and Cecil for organizing the event.

Lunch with David Axmark, Co-founder of MySQL

David Axmark, the Co-founder of MySQL was in Singapore today. The local MySQL interest group meet along with David at GeekTerminal for lunch. David patiently answered variety of questions relating to BitKeeper, GIT, SpikeSource's testing framework , Enterprise version of MySQL, SQLite, India, SQL Injection, etc. Thanks to Wong for organizing the event.

Security Related Groups in Singapore

1) LinkedIn Group for OWASP
2) OWASP-Singapore mailing list
3) Security Meetup - Singapore == Next meeting on 13th Dec 2007.

OWASP Meeting at GeekTerminal Singapore

Two days back, I attended the second OWASP-Singapore (Open Web Application Security Project) meeting at Geek Terminal. Six people turned out and we had three different presentations. Michael Boman spoke about "Overcoming USB (In) Security". He also demonstrated Lock Picking. Wong from Resolve spoke about ILDP Strategies. Later we discussed about MMORPG hacking. We discussed about SecondLife hacking, gaming client hacking, gaming logic exploitation, etc . We also discussed about developing a framework to test and prevent Game Hacking. Later we discussed about websecurity. The whole meeting went for around 3 hours. I wish more people join.

Meta Programming with Ruby at Singapore Ruby Brigade

Choon Keat Chew gave an excellent talk on Meta Programming at the Singapore Ruby Brigade today. He explained meta programming with a logger example. Generally in Java we program to the interface and subclass existing classes to introduce new features. But in Ruby you could directly implement the new method or feature to the object and it instantly gets reflected over the entire scope of the program. It is kinda dangerous in large teams, since anyone can override existing classes and change their behavior by modifying their methods. He also discussed extensively about method_missing , *args feature in Ruby. From what I understand the method_missing function lets you avoid "method not found exception", and also generate setter/getter and other simpler functions automatically. This is one case where meta programming is explicitly visible. He also discussed about simplicity of Rake. Implementing a simple task with Rake will take a lot less time compared with Ant. We also discussed about ducktyping, design patterns and readline library in the end.

Open Web Application Security Project - Singapore Chapter

OWASP-Singapore meetup was held on 9th Oct at Geek Terminal in Singapore. Five of us meet and had a chat for about an hour. Geek Terminal is a nice place for geek meetups. I guess they provide laptops with wifi connection to use and they also have mini rooms with projects for conducting mini talks. I'm not sure if those laptops run Linux, would be great if it does so. Last Saturday Facebook and Slashdot community hosted a meeting there, but I could not make it . I hope we have more of these Security related meeting and Open Hack Days in and around Singapore.

My talk at Singapore Linux Meetup

This wednesday I gave a talk on websecurity titled "Hacking the Web" at Singapore Linux meetup. This is my first talk in Singapore and as usual I was kinda nerves. Around 35 to 40 people attended the talk and there were lot of questions from the audience. We had some technical problems initially, with internet connection. I was not able to connect to the internet from my macbook because of dhcp version mismatch. So I'd to run through the talk without internet connection and then later borrow a Windows laptop to demonstrate things on internet. The slides are hosted at http://www.codeshepherd.com/hackingtheweb/hackingtheweb.html . Thanks to Darrel for organizing the talk and everyone else who came down. I will be giving the same talk at Singapore Poly, National University of Singapore, and Open Source Developers Conference 2007 at Brisbane, in the near future. Overall this talk turned out to be a very good experience.