Day: January 21, 2020

This weekend Fri-Sun we were in Berlin. On Friday we saw a lot about the Nazis and WWII. We went to Bernauer strasse, Mauer park and the East side Gallery. A very historically oriented day. Saturday we went to the DDR museum, German museum of tech, and the German spy museum. A very museum oriented day. Sunday we went to the Berlin zoo, which wasn’t all that nice to the animals and the aquarium. The aquarium was a bit weird, because there were four levels to the building. The first was one aquarium with water and fish. The second level was devoted to reptiles in the desert and forests. The third level was another reptiles level. Fourth was amphibians and insects. The zoo had all sorts of different animals that were in small areas. There weren’t any cages or walls (except for the birds and some of the monkeys. But the enclosures were small. the bull elephant had a winter enclosure that was only a few times larger than him. The mountain goats were extremely bored and were just lying there. Same with most of the other animals. The primate house was saddening. But one of the best bits was that they had chickens that had massive feathery shoes.  Also on Sunday we went to the topography of terror and the holocaust memorial.

That weekend we walked a total of 40km.

On Friday morning we left for Berlin. We woke up at seven’o’clock and had breakfast. Then we piled into the car to drive to Fulda, a town that has a train station that ICE (Inter City Express) come to. We hopped on the ICE that we booked, and off we went. When we got to Berlin we hopped on the S-Bahn, a public travel service. We got off at Anhalter-Bahnof, the hotels station.

First day we did wall stuff. Next was 3 museums. Next day we did the Berlin Zoo, The Berlin Aquarium and Kaiser Wilhelm Church. The Wall I won’t say much about except that it was kinda boring. The first of the museums was The DDR(Pronounced De De Er ), which is a museum devoted to life with the wall.(At the end there was a TDS (Trabant Driving Simulator) which I LOVED.)

We went to Berlin over the weekend. One of the museums that we saw was the German Spy Museum. It was a very interesting and amusing place.

The first thing we noticed was that the museum offered free WiFi. You probably know that for security reasons, you shouldn’t use public WiFi for anything private or secure, like banking. That’s in things like coffee shops, where their business probably isn’t knowing things that they shouldn’t. Spies are in that business. I tunnel all my internet usage through a VPN, encrypted, and I didn’t connect to their network, even though I wasn’t doing anything that used authentication. I really didn’t trust their network.

They also offered free phone charging. Are you starting to see a theme here? Non-wireless phone chargers necessitate plugging a cable into the phone. Most phones allow data syncing over a cable. The data sync port is the charging port. Looking at the phone chargers in the lockers, you can’t tell what they’re plugged into, meaning they could be plugged into a computer. It would also be remarkably easy to destroy a phone by using too high of a voltage in the charger. This is normally impossible to do accidentally, but by cutting the cables and splicing in a stronger power source, it would be possible. Anyway, if a malicious actor has physical access, there’s really nothing that can prevent data destruction, and very little that can prevent data theft, most of which destroys the data.

Interestingly, the charger cables supported the old apple charger that was last used for the iPhone 4s and iPad 3rd generation. Neither of those are seen commonly anymore.

Later in the museum, there was an interactive ‘How secure is your password?’ display. You type in your password, and it tells you how long it would take to brute-force your password and if it’s a common password. The common password part didn’t catch correcthorsebatterystaple (https://www.xkcd.com/936/), but that’s not even the biggest problem. You just typed your password into a computer that you don’t control. The answer to ‘How secure is your password?’ is now ‘It’s not’.

You might think that based on this post, the German Spy Museum is a bad idea, but it’s really not. It was very interesting, and I learned a good bit. If you do go though, be careful. They probably aren’t actually using these security holes, but it’s good to be on the safe side.