João Serra


Codebits 2010 status

Applied. In review.

Bio

I'm a full-featured Geek, Star Wars fan, proud Mac user, VIM is my text editor(ok, i use Textmate too), open source enthusiast and interested in pretty much everything that has a chip in it.
I'm currently attending Engenharia Electrónica, Telecomunicações e Computadores at Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa(aka ISEL)

I've a couple of Microsoft certifications(MCSE and MCSA) and last year i received a "Microsoft Student Partner" award by Microsoft Portugal.(Note: that doesn't mean i'm a MS fanboy)
Speaking of certifications, i also hold a Cisco CCNA cert. and unlike most coders, i do like networking, like configuring Cisco routers, BGP, telco grade networking stuff like MPLS, xDSL, SDH, etc

My favorite languages are Portuguese, English, C/C++ , PHP, Java(oh, by the way, i hate Eclipse) and bash scripting.

In the past i've contributed to an open source project, SiteSeed, a PHP CMS. (http://www.siteseed.com/id10.html)

I've attended all Codebits editions so far, and developed projects in all of them.

Also i like to "hack" TV encryption systems, and in the past i was involved on a number of Nagravision (the encryption used in TVCabo) smart card emulators, chances are that you used some of my code inside the AVR microcontrollers that powered the smart card emulators that you used to watch free SportTV. :)
Some time ago i also reversed the algorithm that Microsoft Mediaroom uses to encrypt the xml encoded data sent/received from STBs to the central server. (http://pastebin.com/f12f3527a)
However the platform is pretty secure and uses some dirty tricks like embedding the login RSA certificates in STB's chipset internal flash in a way that is impossible to dump them, even with JTAG, so my naive attempt to hack the platform was in vain.
(DISCLAIMER : my work on MS Mediaroom reversing was purely educational with the sole intention of trying to watch my subscribed MEO IPTV channels on a regular PC)

Outside computers stuff, i like Uplifting Trance music(do NOT confuse it with goa/psy trance), Politics(yes, i know it's quite unusual for a geek to like Politics), Girls, Super Bock - the world's best beer(sorry Sagres folks, but truth hurts).

Karma points

87

Blog

http://www.mulder3.net

Twitter

http://twitter.com/joaoserra

Skills

APIs : C/C++ : CSS : Desktop : .NET/Mono : Embbeded : Java : Javascript : Mobile : Perl : PHP : Python : Security : Sysadmin : Web

Friends

Alcides António Cruz Artur Jorge Martins Bernardo Cardoso Bruno Daniel Correia Augusto Bruno Miguel Guerra Duarte Galveia Bruno Pedro Carlos Guedes Carlos Morgado Celso Martinho Diogo Medeiros Fausto de Carvalho Frederico Cerdeira (Fred) Gonçalo Manuel Santos Pires José Castro João Carlos Mateus Matias Luís Miguel Machado da Costa Marco Ramos Mario Valente Mehul Sasikante Irá Nuno Morgadinho Paulo Jorge Reis Paulo Laureano Pedro Aniceto Pedro Miguel Dias Marques Gaspar Ricardo Manuel Alves Pinto Rui Carmo Vanessa Nobre Vitor Reis joão ramos




Information

Past editions

Social