Cheers Mate

Man! The past three years (a little more) have been amazing. I have met some of the brightest and nicest people on the planet. So, I am moving back to the US. In fact, I sit here now in the Auckland, New Zeeeland airport clicking this out. It's sad to leave, but I can't want to turn on a new adventure. Matt 3.0.

I left with a nice bang though! Last night was the monthly Ruxmonsecurity/hacker talks in Melbourne, and I delivered a talk: "An Organized Talk on Disorder: Defeating Address Randomization to Make the Universe Boring." I must say that it was one of the best talks I have ever delivered. I talked about a technique I discovered to defeat address space layout randomization. Anyways, I have not publicly published anything on this... yet.

I love Melbourne, Ruxmon, and having made some of the best friends, I will miss this/that place. But In three years, I only saw two kangaroos in the wild, no snakes, no drop bears, one big-ass monster spider, and killed a single jar of Vegemite. Good on me mate.

-Matt

Ruxcon 2012

Wow! This years Ruxcon, hacker/tech conference, was great! There was a great line-up of talks, and plenty of things to do (CTF, hanging out, parties, lock picking). I was on the staff, and did just a minor bit of writing for the handbook, Saturday party organizing, and some MCing... Yes, they let me near the mic. Anyways, I had a blast! One of the greatest things of Melbourne... this con!

-Matt

Ruxcon 2011 and GOAT-Plugs

This weekend has been totally crazy.  I loved it.  Oh, why you ask?  Ummmmmm..... Ruxcon 2011.  Great conference, lots of fantastic talks.  And just hanging out and making friends.  I must give a shout-out to all the Ruxcon crew for accepting my talk, and letting me speak, and putting together an awesome con!  The after parties were great too!  My discourse on GCC plugins, I think, went well.  Sorry for the pretty poor structure here in this post, but I think information was conveyed.  Weekend (including Friday) was awesome.

And now a shameless plug.  The slides for my talk are here:
http://users.757.org/~enferex/enferex_ruxcon2011.pdf

And the source code for GOAT-Plugs are here (GCC Obfuscation Augmentation Tools).  Sweet capra aegagrus hircus Batman! What?!  This is a set of GCC plugins (primarily proof of concept and example code I wrote so people can play with plugins).  The site has more information on what the individual plugins can do.
https://github.com/enferex/GOAT-Plugs

-Matt

Syntax 2011 Demoscene Party

Last night I, with some Ruxcon friends, ventured to the Melbourne High School in South Yarra (near the Lamborghini dealership) where the Syntax 2011 demoscene party was being hosted.  It is awesome to see the scene still fertile, even though I had never really gotten into demos when I was younger.  On the note of the High School, I will mention that this event was no where affiliated with a high school, other than it was just a place to host the geek-out.  The high school, which apparently is pretty posh was like a prison!  I'm not sure if the high wall and barbed wire is to keep kids out or crazies out.  But it doesn't help when the buildings look like guard shacks in a penitentiary.  The art and music at the show was great.  Chiptunes, ansi art, demos, oh my!  Not to mention ... I saw someone rocking some QBasic.

-Matt

Ruxcon 2011: In preparation...

I was awarded a spot to speak at the Ruxcon 2011 security conference in Melbourne. If you're 'round this area, I suggest going to this con. I went last year and had a blast!

http://www.ruxcon.org.au
http://www.ruxcon.org.au/2011-talks/gcc-plugins-die-by-the-sword

-Matt

Troll

Last night was frikkin' awesome. After I did some research towards my PhD, I went to two Ruxmon lectures given by some people I know, Silvio and Laurent. Great talks. After that, I went to Billboards to catch Finntroll's first tour down here in Australia. They played Brisbane last night. And one word ARRRRRRRRGgggGGGHHHHHH. It was frikkin' nuts. Hummpa/folk/black metal from Finnland mostly sung in Sweedish! Lots-o fun, and the two opening acts, the local Obsidieth provided some nice modern thrash with some folkiness to it, while the Perth-based Claim the Throne played some great battle metal/folk metal.

It was the first time I had ever been to a concert, whereby I first give the venue my ticket, a crappy-printed out ticket, and after the gig they hand out true-printed-out tickets, as if you were to have bought the tickets via mail-order... great memorabilia!

-Matt

The Scene

So some of the 757ers might want to know about the scene here in Melbourne, with respect to the hacker world. I must say, I think its great. There is a great group of guys at both Ruxcon and 2600 who have some old school knowledge. Many props to Chris and his Ruxcon people for creating such a fantastic conference last week. Not to mention, the speaker talks were great. I can't even imagine the stress and planning that had to go on, but Chris led-it-up and did a killer job, not to mention he used to edit Phrack, and even do some run some stuff in the ANSI art days. It seems like such an event and the Ruxcon/2600 crews are keeping the knowledge base fresh and exciting. I cant even imagine what things were like in the mid-90s. The "cyber-punk" era. These guys are good.

-Matt

Ruxcon 2010

Went to Ruxcon 2010 this past weekend. Tons of fun and great talks! Oddly enough, I ran into a dude who knows one of my buds back home, Sean. So that was pretty cool!

-Matt