Hey there!

Creating a new category named ‘Offtopic’ feels nasty. Especially if there are only two normal posts existent at this point. Anyhow: I have something to share with you!

Google is recently airing a quite nice advertisement on television. I think marketing experts gloat over the strong interaction by the audience which everybody is forced into when seeing this 30 second clip. So try it yourself (English version first):

And for our German readers:
For all the Christmas lovers – there’s a special XMas version, too.

Ok, you got the idea. Now here is what we came up with. Enjoy!

Have a great day!
Your TROOPERS team

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PS: By the way… did anybody notice that Google

a) ships a faster version of Chrome on the German-speaking market.

OR

b) they think that English speaking customers are more clever than German-speaking ones!

Why do I come up with such strange thoughts? The punch line in the English version says “Browse the web as fast as you think”. And in the German clip “Im Internet surfen. Schneller als man denkt.” – which is something like: “Surf the net. Faster than you think.” Am I missing something?

PS2: If somebody from Google reads this, please feel free to send one of your ITSec guys free of charge to TROOPERS11 (instead of suing us for messing with your latest ads – let us know, if that’s not cool).

I would like to take the chance to wish everybody a successful and healthy New Year. Everything looks like TROOPERS11 is going to be the biggest event yet. We have plenty of new ideas on our roadmap which we will push through until end of March. Heidelberg is then going to be the center of IT security for one week.

But it is also a good point to look back and thank everybody who attended, supported and created past TROOPERS events. In the end it is an collaborative achievement and we are happy to have everybody on board. Again we are proud to welcome some regular guests from industry and academia as well as long-served Veteran TROOPERS speakers like Rodrigo, Sergey and Bryan. Accompanied by last year’s stars (like Graeme from New Zealand, Chema from Spain and the US boys Steve & Marsh) and plenty of new faces everything is set for an excellent edition of the conference. And this is what it is all about: A rapidly growing community of competence.

I mentioned Bryan Fite before – he is more than a business partner and colleague to  ERNW. Besides being a good friend to some of us he is the brains behind PacketWars™ (it is taking place for the fourth time on German soil at TROOPERS11) and creator of the DAY-CON conference in Dayton, Ohio. DAY-CON is what we call the sister conference to TROOPERS and vice versa. Both conferences embody the same self-imposed goals of high-end education without any compromise on anything. There is more to say about this topic – we will cover it in an upcoming post. Maybe also Bryan wants to write something about PacketWars in this space. So stay tuned.

Best wishes,
Florian

PS: Visit http://www.vimeo.com/user3068266/videos for plenty of recordings from DAY-CON IV. For example Enno’s and Graeme’s talk on supply chain insecurity: http://www.vimeo.com/17201379 Enjoy!