22C3: Private Investigations (2005)

Das vierte Türchen der #35C3 Memory Lane: Mysteriöse Quanten

DE

35c3-kalender 4

Das vierte Türchen.

„Die Quanten sind doch eine hoffnungslose Schweinerei!“, soll Niels Bohr einst an Albert Einstein geschrieben haben. Schweinerei hin oder her, die Quantenphysik ist auf jeden Fall ein faszinierendes Themenfeld, weil sie unser Wissen darüber, wie die Welt funktioniert, grundlegend in Frage stellt. Quantencomputer und Quantenkryptographie sind auf dem Chaos Communication Congress immer …

22C3 audio and video podcasts available

EN

Oh yes, it took a while. But we finally managed to finalize the 22C3 audio and video recordings and to provide them via a podcast feed as well.

We now provide audio recordings in MP3, MPEG-4 Audio and Ogg Vorbis format and videos in MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) 320×240 format in addition to our originally posted full resolution MPEG-4 versions. The new videos run on the iPod and are around 25% the size of the big files.

To make the material easily accessible, you can subscribe to the main podcasts feeds for either audio or video or just download the files directly from these web pages:

About the event ID

EN

As you might have noticed, each lecture recording has an ID (three or four digits long) that is embedded in the file name and the introductory slide in the video itself. You also find this event ID on the 22C3 Fahrplan being used in URLs and such.

The more important information is that this ID will be unique over ALL Chaos Communication Congresses since 1998 (not everything is online properly but it will). So there is not only no clash with IDs used at 21C3, there won’t be one with 23C3 as well. And this goes for all events that have been planned with our Pentabarf conference planning …

Gentlemen, fire up your clients (2nd Update)

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All recorded 22C3 videos are online now (via BitTorrent and HTTP). Get the individual torrent files or get all torrent files in one tar.gz archive: 22C3-videos-complete-20050506.tar.gz (here are the checksums).

We still plan to provide complete torrent sets and extra torrent sets optimized for DVD-sized download chunks so that it is easier to archive that stuff. We are a bit distracted by other stuff currently, but we will bring you an update soon. Audio-only versions will follow soon as will the iPod-versions.

If you want to mirror the content, please use BitTorrent to get the files and …

It’s Feedback Time

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We are coming along well. The recordings are on the server now and we are creating .torrent files now. Once ready, we will publish them so that you can use BitTorrent to download them. Once we feel that the first run is over, we will open direct HTTP access to the files. If we would do this from the beginning, I am sure the server wouldn’t survive it.

So now that we are able to give you what you want, there is something we want from you:

PLEASE PROVIDE FEEDBACK ON THE LECTURES!
USE THE FEEDBACK FORMS!

Each event has it’s own unique feedback URL, easily accessible on each event’s web page in …

Here we go

EN

I uploaded the first official 22C3 video recording: it’s the recording of the opening speech and keynote. Unfortunately, the video quality itself is not good as this is one of the recordings that had to be recovered from the failed realtime recordings. Most other videos will be much better. Here it is:

22C3-390-en-private_investigations.mp4 (MPEG-4, 1.2 MBit/s)

A few notes on the format: this is a standard MPEG-4 encoded (audio and video) file in a standard MP4 container file. The native resolution is 720×576 pixels but as this is derived from video, it is a non-square pixel format. The file …

Ninety-Five Percent

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Yes we know, we suck. But rest assured a lot of work is being done to bring the 22C3 videos out. Consider it to be 95% done and we are pretty confident you will hear from us soon.

There has been a lot of talk on why things took so long (again) and although I won’t dig into the whole story here, it was a sequence of disasters that started with almost all realtime recordings being plagued by non-linear syncing of audio and video. So most of the material had to be recovered and re-encoded from DV backup tapes which took a long time (around 2 TB of data had to be moved to and fro).

As a few …

22C3 Fahrplan 2.0 Update

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We just released the “2.0” update to the 22C3 Fahrplan which now includes most lecture materials (excluding just a few slides by some lazy speakers). There will be some minor updates in the coming days to add the remaining stuff and another update to point to the recordings once the audio and video files are online.

22C3 recordings update

EN

We expected to be done by now but there is still work to be done. Main problem is that we have to manually rearrange around 50 sessions to fix the audio syncing which was garbled due to technical problems. But we are making progress, step by step and we are slowly reaching the end of the tunnel.

As the stuff is ready, it will be available both via BitTorrent and a podcast (podcast might kick in a bit later to wait for the main rush to flow down).

Thanks for your patience.

Chaosradio International

EN

We are promoting our English language Chaosradio podcasts now under a new label called Chaosradio International to make clear what is easily consumable by non-German speakers. We released episode CRI005 today and you can access the other four episodes as well that feature interviews with selected speakers of 22C3.

22C3 Recordings: The Final Samples

EN

Okay. Good news on the horizon. All videos are collected, a naming scheme is defined and we have sorted out our formats. The encoding machines are ready to run. And will be started any moment.

To give you the chance for some final checking, we have put up some samples for the various formats for you to test. So if you are technically inclined you might want to check them out in terms of quality and compatibility. The sample is always the same two minute clip.

22C3 Speaker Interviews

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After pointing you to a German summary in our podcast let’s also point you to four podcast interviews done with 22C3 speakers. Each podcast begins with a short German introduction but the interviews are held in English.

We should have done more of this stuff! And we certainly will in the future.

Rückschau auf den 22c3 im Chaosradio Express

DE

Dear English-speaking readers of this blog: The remainder of this post is in German. Sorry for that, but the podcast featured is in German as well.

Aus unerfindlichen Gründen haben wir den Podcast Chaosradio Express hier noch nie erwähnt. Vor dem 22c3 gab es einige Sendungen, die sich mit dem Congress und seinen Vorbereitungen beschäftigt haben. Letzte Woche gab es dann den Chaosradio Express 014 (mp3, website), der auf den vergangenen 22. Chaos Communication Congress zurückblickt. Im Gespräch lassen Tim Pritlove und Jens Ohlig ausgewählte Vorträge und Präsentationen des Congress Revue …

22C3 recordings and slides

EN

There has been some confusion regarding the AV recordings and slides of the 22C3 lectures. So let us explain what is coming and that everything will be fine.

The good news is: everything has been recorded! Yes, we have had our accidents but the fallback systems have worked so nothing is lost. As quite a few recordings have to be recovered from tape, the whole process will take a while but we are confident that we can deliver what everybody wants by the end of January.

More confusion has been generated as a couple of recordings have been available in WMV format up front which made many people …

Did you know?

EN

Some people still get it wrong but I’d like to clarify it here one more time: it’s neither the “Chaos Computer Conference” nor the “Chaos Computer Congress”. It’s the “Chaos Communication Congress“. Not that it is too important but in the end we would be happy if you would just get it right ;)

In case you’re still confused, just stick to the “xxC3” moniker we have established in the recent years. It’s our primary choice for tagging as well.

Thanks for listening. This was a recording.

BlinkenArea 22C3 summary

EN

The BlinkenArea considers positive results of the 22C3, too. Although our ISDN card broke for the 520 pixel projects at the third day, we received 613 calls to play Pong, Tetris, Retris, Snake, XXO, Pacman and Breakout. Some used other functions like displaying the time or sending love letters. 69024 times a movie was shown from our playlists.

bug fixed in Pong and Snake

If a second player calls, the ball will sometimes disappear. This bug in Pong we already fixed before the 22C3. At the congress we had no troubles with that one anymore. Some attentive gamers discovered a new “security hole” …

Slides are a-coming

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We are still busy collecting slides of the talks from our speakers and will put them into the web-based schedule as soon as possible. If you have given a talk at 22C3 and still haven’t submitted your slides please do so now. Thanks.

22C3 Proceedings

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The 22C3 Proceedings are available in PDF format. It’s a 17,1 MB download.

Thanks to everybody who bought the paper copy to support 22C3. If you are still interested in a copy, contact us.

22C3 is over now

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22C3 ended today and we couldn’t be happier with how everything went. This have been four days of exciting activity and creativity, discussion and communication. Thanks to everybody for coming, sharing ideas and just being great.

Please stay subscribed to this blog. We’re going to point you to final activities regarding 22C3 in the coming weeks and we continue to publish here about upcoming CCC events and related stuff.

If you are still in Berlin, meet us at CCCB at Marienstrasse 11 on Sunday if you like. You’re welcome to join.

Blinken Bluetooth

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The Blinken Bluetooth installation is running since day 2 in the Blinkenarea (Art&Beauty) and triggers blinken movies depending on Bluetooth device names and types and on Bluetooth events like l2ping and iscan.

Now the source code of the project is available from the Chaostal project page.
Happy blinking out there! :)

Proceedings

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Right now, the proceedings, a collection of 39 papers submitted to congress lectures are available as a paper book at the members counter(desk) at the Chaos Care Center (B-Ring). The Bundle contains the Proceedings, a”M.I.S.C.”-journal and a “Fahndungsplakat”. The paper version is about 30 euro. The collection is also available as a PDF

Speakers: Blackwing & Swaio

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Sebastian WernerSebastian “blackwing” Werner, is a twenty-four-year old student of chemical engineering at Erlangen University. With over 10 years of Linux and OpenSource experience, his focus moved to Inter-Networking, NetworksSecurity and especially BGP during the years. Together with other volunteers he takes care of the servers of the Erlangen Chaos Computer Club, the ftp server of his university, and helps administering the network infrastructure in his dormitory.

Stefan Wahl Stefan Wahl, a forty-year old CEO of his own company since 2001 (Netsign GmbH) is working as a consultant and trouble shooter for enterprise …

Fun with CCTV in Austria

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The guys of q/uintessenz will give information about the Austrian CCTV-Hack (see German spiegel.de) on day 4 at 15:00 in English at their booth. (On the C-Level (1st floor) between congress-radio and funk-amateurs)

For reasons of hygiene …

EN

… the congress center is now monitored by cams – no official, but very personal ones! You don’t believe? Take a look at the men’s room at level A.

For those of you, who have the wrong gender, like me ;), here’s a shot:
Level A

Special Thanks to Mike ;)

Give us your slides

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For the Congress Documentation we need the slides that speakers presented during their talks. If you haven’t already handed in your slides at the speakers’ room (B03), please do so! If the slides are available on the internet, it is sufficient to tell us the URL where they are downloadable. It is very important for us to get your slides before the end of the congress, since we want to start documenting this event as soon as possible.

Austrian Chaos looking for people from Graz

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At the Regiotreff there have been two geeks who want to establish a ChaosTreff in Graz – may you drop by at the cngw and have a chat with us; we are interested in getting in touch – may we can help you a little bit and provide some infrastructure.

CongressRadio Podcast #6 veröffentlicht

EN

Dear English-speaking readers of this blog: The remainder of this post is in German. Sorry for that, but this Podcast is in German too. There will be English Podcast from the CongressRadio soon. If you want to join the CongressRadio-team, contact them here, call them at DECT “1234” or just ask one of the folks running around with microphones in their hands :-)

Das CongressRadio befragt im Podcast Nr. 6 den SPD-Bundestagsabgeordneten Jörg Tauss über das Informationsfreiheitsgesetz des Bundes, welches am 1. Januar 2006 in Kraft treten wird.

Alphaville

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The Villa was a groundbreaking real-time multi-user dungeon delivered via the telephone creating an audible virtual environment where people could “move” around and interact just by typing on the phone’s keypad (DTMF). The system was running from 1994 to 2001 when the project ended.

The code has been rewritten by one of the original authors and a new system called Alphaville has been created that is now attached to the 22C3’s phone network. Just dial 98 to get in. This time, the virtual space is modelled after the 22C3 building. Check out the description on the wiki for additional …

Capture the flag at room 4

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Capture The Flag is a hacker contest running right now. Eight teams of hackers battle against each other in a fight of supremacy in a network full of vulnerable services. The teams’ task is to defend a server while simultaneously attacking the other teams’ servers. You can watch the contest at room 4 in the basement.

Use more bandwidth

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Total Bandwith
We have about 16 GBit/s Upstream, provided by multiple upstreams – and our peaks are not even reaching one GBit. It really is a shame – so please, use our bandwidth, it is intended to be used.
Useful purposes are strongly preferred (read: no DDOS bullshit or spamming ;)), so for example seeding the Wikipedia DVD might be a really good idea. If you have another cool idea to use more bandwidth, place it here in the comments.

Diskussion: Sicherheit vs. Überwachung

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Am Donnerstag findet um 12 Uhr eine kurzfristig anberaumte Podiumsdiskussion zu freiheitlichen Grundfragen statt. Anlass ist die bis vor kurzem noch unabwendbar scheinende Videoüberwachung des Congresses, welche erst kurz vor Beginn der Veranstaltung verhindert werden konnte.

An der deutschsprachigen Diskussion nehmen padeluun, Frank Rosengart, Andy Müller-Maghun und Jens Ohlig teil.

Pegs needed!

EN

If you have some pegs or clothespin (Wäscheklammer) at home, please bring them to the event. The Peg-DHCP system needs some more – and there aren’t anymore to by at Alexanderplatz. Please leave them at the NOC-Helpdesk in the hackcenter or the C-Ring.

Still Lighting Talk-slots available tomorrow

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Lightning Talks are concept which was introduced at 21C3. You can quickly show up your project and raise attention for it.

The Lightning Talks are 5-minute talks by various people combined in a set of 10 talks in one hour. We do a set each day in Saal 4 at four o’clock. The set for tomorrow is intended to be used by ideas for Lighting Talks which spring up on the congress.

So now is your chance to register a Lighting Talk at the wiki page.

Sign your badge please

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Please write your name or nickname on your badge. That is very helpful if you lose your badge and someone shall find it (otherwise you have to buy a new one and that’s not nice). Markers can be found at booth infodesks an the cash point. It’s also useful to stabilize the eyelet of the envelope of your badge with a bit gaffa-tape.

Hi Outside World. :-)

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Apparently most journalists which attended our lectures yesterday are now back at their working places and doing their job – some good, some bad (hey, we do have way more than 36 women at the congress, and our Wireless LAN is working well, but tim already complained about that journalist ;)). Sadly, this means for this poor web server that several quite big news sites all over the world are now linking events.ccc.de, and the load on this machine is going to hurt. Our countermeasures are working really good at the moment, but it might be possible that we have to shut down part of this website, …

LinuxTag: Free Software Apres 2005 Party

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During the 22C3 conference, taking place in Berlin from December 27 – 30, LinuxTag Association invites all friends and supporters of Free Software to an informal get-together, looking back to events and results of 2005. Doors open at 8 o’clock p.m. at newthinking store, Tucholsky Str. 48, 10117 Berlin on Wednesday (day 2 of 22C3). Drinks and some finger food will be provided. The is no cover charge. All friends of Free software are welcome. Prior registration is not necessary.

The party venue is some 15 minutes from Alexanderplatz (where 22C3 takes place). Take the S-Bahn to Friedrichstraße …

Volunteers for BlinkenGame

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The BlinkenArea crew is currently developing a new, open-source Jump’n’Run game “BlinkenSisters: Hunt for the Lost pixels”.

If you want to help our effort, we still need volunteers for the following jobs: Level-Design, Graphics and Sound. Please contact CAVAC in the BlinkenArea (the guy with the iBook and the yellow “Pesthoernchen”-Shirt).

Python contest: Coding for a Keyboard

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Everybody who is passionate in python hacking is invited to participate at the Python Coding Contest. The shortest python class for solving the following problem is wanted.

“Subject of the contest is to code the shortest possible python module that converts decimal numbers to the seven-segment display format.” For more details look at the job description or ask Sol. The contest will be open until Friday. The winner can select between two nice keyboards.

Speakers: Constanze Kurz

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Constanze KurzAlthough a computer scientist, Constanze Kurz is mainly active in the cultural enrichment of the 22c3: At midnight of day 1 and day 2 (so just at the moment when day 2 and day 3 begin) cultural aspects of current hacker issues are explored in lecture hall 1:

  • Tonight Conz will show us how biometrics play a role in Sci Fi films (some of the material is in German, so we have announced it as a German lecture, but even with little knowledge of German, you can follow the lecture, because some of the clips are in English or from well-know films);
  • Tomorrow Conz’s audio drama team (from Humboldt …

Conference streaming: audio and video

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On the 22C3 Conference Streaming Homepage you can get information, how to receive the audio and video streams of the conference. The audio streams are offered as OGG and MP3. The video streams are being produced in a number of formats. As well, there is a streaming-relay outside, featured by the Streaming Crew of the Forschungsgemeinschaft elektronische Medien (FEM) Ilmenau, which uses the Windows Media Video format. There you can get some videos on demand already.

If you have trouble while watching the streams, check out the newest version of your media player, e.g. mplayer or VLC.

Warning: Bluetooth use at own risk!

EN

Unexpectedly, there are some bluetooth-hackers out. They are very good. The first person had to send his or her phone to the service of its manufacturer. We recommend you to switch of bluetooth at your mobile phone off or at least to use it in the non-discoverable mode.

Speakers are asked to visit the Konferenzleitung

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If you are a speaker, please check in at the conference organisation team. Its office is located in room B03, which you find at the end of the B-Ring (ground floor), opposite the conference rooms. There you will get an introduction, the golden rules for speakers and a copy of the proceedings if you submitted a paper in time.

Need Linux? Get Ubuntu!

EN

If you’re in the need of Linux, come to the NOC helpdesk or to the chaos Frankfurt table (directly under the Austria flag/light sabre) next to the lift in the hackcenter. We’ve brought to you “some” Ubuntu 5.10 install and live CDs for PC, 64Bit and mac. So come and get your free Ubuntu CD!

Please: Leave your feedback (and bring a printer, too)

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We now have a feedback form online for every talk. You can help us when you give your opinion on all talk you visited at 22C3. It only takes you a few seconds to fill it out but it will be very, very helpful for us when we plan the next congress. For example, here’s the feedback page for “Private Investigations — Opening Show and Keynote Speech“. You can find feedback pages for all talks and events in the Fahrplan.

Also on the topic of being helpful: We need a printer for the infodesk (two printers would be even better). We need network laser printers with PostScript. If you are at the …

blinking the Alexanderplatz

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The Blinkenarea project TroiCade is working. The huge pixel matrix (3,50 x 4,50m) in the window shows the outside world that unusual things are happening inside the bcc. TroiCade is just a small part of the Troia installation. TroiCade plays Arcade movies and offers the usual games via phone like Pong, Snake, XXO, Tetris, Pacman and Breakout.

TroiCade

For more information and technical details visit the Blinkenarea in Art & Beauty.

Submitting news – be an editor!

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The news about this event shall flow easily – from you, to you.

So you are invited to submit interesting news directly to this blog. For that, it is necessary to register as an user. So you can write drafts, which will be placed as soon as possible on this blog.

Basically information is free – but we try to get some order in this: For these news is the category “22C3 on the run” created. It has some subcategories, which may inspire you about what to write:

  • Happenings: Workshops, Demonstrations, Post-Lightingtalk-Meetings, Hacks, Fun, Parties
  • Technic: Network, Phone, Power
  • Organic: Food, Loo …

Still some workshop slots available

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This year we will provide possibilities for doing workshops in a more open way: They are located in the workshop area in the hackcenter – no more in a conference room. You can easily submit your demonstration, discussion or brainstorming on the workshop area page at the 22C3 Wiki. There are still up to 25 hours left – especially on the first and last day.

The workshop area offers a good opportunity for getting deeper into topics, which were mentioned in a Lightning Talk – presumed that the lighting-talker has reserved a hour or two in the workshop area.

If you need a bit server space with HTTP …

Hero-Z 22C3 Comic: “Private Investigations”

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Hero-Z 22C3 CD

The cool people of Zone-H that will give a lecture named “Corp vs. Corp” have a second identity named Hero-Z that produces cool comics and now they have released their forth episode dedicated to 22C3.

The title matches the 22C3 motto: “Private Investigations“. You can download the full comic as one huge PDF file.

The comic series’ super-heroine Evil Angelica also did a darkish, electronic “theme song” for the comic. Get this in MP3.

They will distribute a limited set of CDs with the PDF and theme …

Hardware Shopping

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This time, there will be a small hardware shop on location at 22C3 (in front of lecture room 2). If you need things like DVDs, CDs, hard disks and such they might be able to help. At Alexanderplatz you also find the “Saturn” electronic supermarket that might provide less specialized stuff (phones, cables, whatever).

Speakers: Brenno de Winter

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Brenno de WinterBrenno de Winter is an IT journalist and activist from the Netherlands. Moreover, he is a brillant speaker whose lectures are both entertaining and informative. So don’t miss his lecture on Cryptography which has already been mentioned on this blog.
Perhaps even more important will be his contribution on the topic of data retention, which has unfortunately become a top issue in current European politics. Where most activists just lament over the mayhem of civil rights and liberties, Brenno’s lecture on Hacking Data Retention – How bureaucrats fail to fight terror shows the hacker approach to …

Taken from the Public Wiki: Keep clean during 22C3

EN

Not far away from the bcc, just about one kilometre down the road, you can find the indoor swimming pool Schwimmhalle Fischerinsel. There you have the chance to swim, take a shower or relax in the sauna. Reason enough to take your swimming trunks or swimsuit with you!

entry fees:

  • 8:00h-20:00h: 4, € or 2,50 € with discount
  • before 8:00h or after 20:00h: 2,50 € for everybody

opening times during 22C3:

  • 27.12.: 06:30 – 14:00
  • 28.12.: 10:00 – 22:00
  • 29.12.: 06:30 – 22:00
  • 30.12.: 06:30 – 22:00

How to get there: Go out of the bcc and turn left at the big street. Just walk down the street, having the …

Wikipedia auf dem 22C3

DE

Dear English-speaking readers of this blog: The remainder of this post is in German. Sorry for that, but the talk featured will be in German as well (only about 15% of the talks at the 22c3 will not be in English this year).

Henriette Fiebig Wikipedia, die freie Enzyklopädie in mehr als 100 Sprachen, ist auch dieses Mal wieder auf dem Congress vertreten. Henriette Fiebig, Autorin von “Wikipedia — Das Buch” unternimmt in ihrem Vortrag “Hexenbesen und heiliger Gral — Vorläufige und subjektive Gedanken zur inhaltlichen Qualität von Wikipedia-Artikeln” einen Parforceritt durch die Qualitätskontrollprozesse des …

Talks at 22C3: The trouble with Blackberries

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ImagesStarting in the middle of the year a few concerns popped up in the mainstream press about security of RIM’s Blackberry toys. You know the little “Managers’ favourite Tamagotchi” feeding all your e-mails through RIM’s own hub… The professional paranoids were not very surprised by that.

First there was the investigative magazine “Computerwoche” telling that at car manufacturer Audi concerns remained to rethink if it’s a good idea to transfer confidential data via the RIM network.

A bit later on another magazine known for detailed and precise reports called Wirtschaftswoche leaked it’s own …

Capture the Flag at 22C3

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“Capture The Flag is a hacker contest. Teams of hackers battle against each other in a fight of supremacy in a network full of vulnerable services. The teams’ task is to defend a server while simultaneously attacking the other teams’ servers. At the beginning, all teams have the same services running. A central game server checks the services regularly by sending tickets, the so-called flags, which are collected later on. Every flag that is still there is awarded with scores. Whenever a team manages to read a flag on another system then their own, they can submit it at the game-server, thus …

Hackcenter Registration over

EN

The registration period for the hackcenter is over, and all seats are already distributed. Every project but the *BSD-projects should have just received the confirmation mail – if no mail arrives until Saturday, 17th, please mail to 22c3-hackcenter (at) cccv.de. Our apologies to all those who were not accepted, we had to reject several projects we personally really liked, but we don’t have enough space for all cool projects out there. Sorry.

The BSD-Projects (NetBSD, OpenBSD, OpenSSH, 9fans, MirOS and Darwin) will get their mails until Monday, we have some specific issues there.

Status update

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Things are extremely busy with the 22C3 crew. Here’s what keeps us spinning at the moment:

  • Two more speakers need to hand in details
  • A few dates and times for talks have to be pushed around and re-arranged on request of some speakers
  • Once these things are finalized, we have to release the stable version of the schedule which will hopefully not change until the end of the conference
  • There are pressing deadlines for printed stuff: the proceedings of the conference (containing all the papers speakers handed in) and the all new and shiny “Congress Guide” for first-timers.

But don’t panic. …

Low-cost sleeping at 22C3: The Gym

EN

We recommend getting a place to sleep during the congress early. There are various possibilities. If you can afford it, getting a hotel room is probably the best, with a real bed and a real shower. If you are lucky enough to have friends in the capital you can bother between Christmas and New Year, getting a couch to crash on may also be neat. Now, what if you don’t happen to have these options? Then the gym is for you.

The gym is only two underground stations away from the congress venue. Staying there will cost you 5 € per night. You can buy tickets at the entrance of the bcc where you also …

Speakers: Corinna Habets

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PallasCorinna Habets aka ‘pallas’ studies Computer Science at the RWTH Aachen. But her interests aren’t limited to programming language. She takes an interest in natural languages too. After starting to learn many different languages she is currently learning Esperanto with great success and enthusiasm and will speak about her experience with this nerdy language at the 22C3.
But that is not her only contribution to the program. Corinna also initiated the Lyrical I lyrics contest. As you can see, Corinna’s contributions significantly enlarge the diversity of this year’s program, which has never been …

Topics at 22C3: Voting early, voting often

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Event-1134-128X128
Vote early, vote often” is a quote variously attributed to three different Chicagoans: Al Capone, the famous gangster; Richard J. Daley, mayor from 1955 to 1976; and William Hale Thompson, mayor from 1915-1923 and 1931-1935. All three were notorious for their corruption and their manipulation of the democratic process. It is most likely that Thompson invented the phrase, and Capone and Daley later repeated it.

Voting early (and not …

Chaosradio Express erklärt euch den Congress

DE

Another entry in German…

Ihr solltet möglichst die aktuelle, einstündige Ausgabe von Chaosradio Express anhören. Warum? Weil sie ziemlich komplett großartig ist und Freude auf den Congress macht, darum. Am Mikro sitzen Tim und fukami und stellen ihre Highlights aus dem Congressprogramm vor. Podcast-Freunde mit iTunes können den Feed auch einfach abonnieren, um weitere Folgen nicht zu verpassen, alle anderen schauen einfach mal hier.

We need your help

EN

Help Key To a large extent, the 22C3 is a volunteer-driven event. We call the volunteers “Angels” and many odd jobs that need to be done at the congress rely on them. Angels don’t really get financial benefits, but they are rewarded for their enthusiastic and heroic actions with a free t-shirt and catering. If you want to join them, you’ll find everything you need to know in the Angel FAQ at our public wiki.

But wait, there’s more. This year, we want to have people helping out with one specific task. We have hundreds of talks at the conference. Last year, speakers just came unto the stage without an …

Meanwhile, in the offline world: Under Construction

EN

While Berlin gets into the top ten list of the world’s coolest cities hands down, sometimes the city officials surprise you with their unerring sense of bad taste. No, we’re not talking about the plan to turn the Alexanderplatz’s landmark TV tower into a pink football during the FIFA World Cup next year (with a little help from that company that quite surprisingly uses a similar colour scheme). We’re talking about Alexa (link is in German, but the pictures are fun nevertheless), the “shopping and leisure centre” currently being built on Alexanderplatz, right next to the bcc.

Speakers at the 22C3: Bert Bos

EN

Speaker-593-128X128
You know a person is of a certain importance when there is a Wikipedia entry dedicated to him or her. Bert Bos is such a person. Working for the W3C, Bert Bos is one of the minds behind CSS, the standard for Cascading Style Sheets.

Bert Bos will do two talks at 22c3: “W3C on Mobile, CSS, Multimodal and more” on day 1 and “The Web according to W3C” on day 3. Are these talks on hacking? We think so. While web page design normally has little to do with computer security, we prefer a broader definition of “hacking”, anyway. Conceiving and designing a system to bring art and beauty to computers …

Referenten beim 22c3: Jörg Tauss

DE

Dear English-speaking readers of this blog: The remainder of this post is in German. Sorry for that, but the talk featured will be in German as well (only about 15% of the talks at the 22c3 will not be in English this year).

Speaker-833-128X128
Zum ersten Mal in der Geschichte des Chaos Communication Congress können wir einen Referenten begrüßen, der aus dem höchsten Gremium der Politik in Deutschland kommt. Der SPD-Abgeordnete Jörg Tauss ist seit …

Congress Web page: 1, Microsoft Internet Explorer: 0

EN

It’s time to share a little secret with you about the congress planning process. With hundreds of talks and workshops handed in, it’s hard to keep an overview. In fact, it’s probably impossible. During the planning phase of 21C3 (last year’s congress), we conceived and hacked Pentabarf, our open source conference planning tool and database frontend (don’t ask about the name, it’s a Discordian thing). Actually, “we” is not quite correct, our hero here is Sven, coder extraordinaire and high-order hacker, whom we probably cannot be grateful enough to for making this beautiful beast possible — …

Hackcenter Registration now open

EN

Hackcenter Registration is now up and running until December 15th – if you want to get some seats in the hackcenter, make sure to register there. You will get a mail on Sunday, December 18th telling if your project was accepted.

The Hackcenter is this year about half the size it used to be, so please don’t be too worried if you don’t get a seat there. Please keep in mind that the Hackcenter is neither a Lan-Party Area nor a place to deposit your luggage. Laptop users might want to take a seat in our brand new Lounge instead of the Hackcenter which will be way more cozy than the …

I want to be an angel

EN

22C3 would not be possible without the help of all our participants. This year you can be a good participant by smoking less, try to protect the building from unnecessary damage and harm and buying a business or charity ticket in order to support what we do. Or you can join the Chaos Angels who run many important operations at 22C3. Without angels there would be no congress.

As usual we have opened up a Chaos Angel Registration system and we ask you to register if you want to help out during 22C3. Chaos Angels get a lot of things in return for their work. Check out the Chaos Angel FAQ.

22C3 Press Review

EN

If you find an article about 22C3 on the web, feel free to put a link in the press review page in our 22C3 wiki. Thanks.

Congress Podcasting

EN

There are two new channels you can get audible information about 22C3 from. However, both are them are in German only (if somebody wants to do English podcasting let us know).

First, there is CongressRadio which is planning continuous coverage before and during the event. They have already posted their third episode. There is now a phone-based audio feedback system as well. Check it out.

In addition, Chaosradio has started to do a weekly podcast in addition to the monthly talk radio show called Chaosradio Express. You currently get it all together in a single podcast feed.

Photos

EN

If you want to get a visual impression of the Congress atmosphere, take a look at last year’s photo documentation. There will be a Photo Documentation this year as well. Moreover, there is a Flickr interest group named 22c3 where participants can put their pictures. Tag them with something like 22c3 chaoscommunicationcongress ccc and use a copyleft license (e.g. Creative Commons 2.0 by).
Hackers are very sensitive about a possible appearance in photos, especially if these photos are widely spread on the internet (which is generally the case nowadays). So please make sure to ask people before …

Oh, the anticipation!

EN

Great news everyone! We will publish the schedule for this year’s congress within the next minutes… er… hours… er… today. Stay tuned. It’s worth it!

The Smoking Situation

EN
Non Smoking Ashtray Quite an issue last year. Smoking situation was so bad that even heavy smokers complained about the bad air. Of course, smoking is forbidden in the art&beauty-area, the lecture halls and in the Hackcenter, as it was last year.

But for the rings we want to improve the situation and discussed many suggestions in the last months.
As the technical solution for this problem is way to expensive for us – as nerds, we would prefer that of course – we had to find a social one. So here it is: We kindly ask everyone not to smoke in the …

Haecksen

EN
Haecksen Logo This year the Haecksen found a new home base at the congress. Their gathering place is in the Haecksen Area at the back of A08. As usual there will be a sofa, some tee and nice lights making the Haecksen Area one of the cosier places at the congress.

So if you are interested in meeting other women who are in this in computer stuff like you are there is the place to be. And don’t be shy if you are owner of a y-chromosome, you are welcome too, of course.

But the Haecksen Area is more than a nice hangout for the female …

Learning cryptography through handcyphers

EN

For many people cryptography is something that they consider too complicated. While most current implementations demand a strong knowledge of the mathematical background, the basic principles are quite easy to catch. In order to understand these principles Brenno de Winter will go back in time in his lecture Learning cryptography through handcyphers – Shaping a digital future with ancient wisdom to take a look at the evolution of modern cryptography.

He will focus on handcyphers that can be used without a computer and have grown in complexity throughout time even tough some early mechanisms …

Lightning Talks

EN

Good ideas deserve to be stolen. Lightning talks are such a fantastic idea that we just had to nick it. We were inspired to have our own lightning talks at 21C3 (last year) by the Perl community who may not have invented the concept but definitely introduced it to a larger audience at their YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference).

But what is a lightning talk? It’s a 5-minute talk you (for reasons of your own) don’t feel like doing as a full 1-hour presentation. Maybe the topic is too obscure. Maybe the research you want to present is still too much in progress. Maybe you just want to talk about a …

Honeymonkeys

EN

Honeypots are a well known and deployed technique to gather information about new and unknown attack vectors. While there are many different types of honeypots used on server side to detect threats or spamming activities for example, there isn’t very much out there to deal with client harassment. Microsoft has recently started a new research initiative to actively detect those client-side threats on a larger scale by having a computer or a virtual PC that actively mimics the actions of a user surfing the web.

In their lecture Honeymonkeys – Chasing hackers with a bunch of monkeys Krisztian …

Workshop Area

EN

Last year the workshop room was just a smaller lecture hall where not workshops but lectures took place. This year we would like to see real hands-on-workshops hold by you instead. There will be a table under the windows in the roof of room A08 at the end of the Hackcenter. At this table fit about 23 people and there will be no digital projector or other kind of presentation device. So, can you think of its use? Right! It’s the workshop area!
As the congress is a quite dynamic environment we just set up a page in the congress-wiki where you can reserve some time at this table to do any …

22C3 Public Wiki

EN

We have opened the 22C3 Public Wiki. It’s late, but it’s here. We are still filling it. Please use it and contribute. If you miss something or have any other general question that you think should be covered by the wiki, place your question in the FAQ.

Note that you can access the Wiki via http and https. We recommend using https for security reasons. You might want to install our CCCV-CA certificate to get around the browser warnings regarding unknown certificates. Mac OS X users can install this systemwide, other platforms might use the certificate in the browser.

Lyrical I

EN


Have you ever written an ode to your favorite Window Manager or a haiku about biometric passports? If so, share your works with us! If not, it’s time to get started, since the dead line of the 22c3 lyrics contest Lyrical I is upcoming! All contributions should reach lyrical_iATccc.de by December, 4th.
What are we looking forward to?

  • lovely poetry
  • fun
  • new and unconventional approaches to topics
  • original signatures and fortune cookies for all :-)

The best contributions (in German or English) will be awarded prizes sponsored by foebud and read aloud during the awarding ceremony at the …

Vulnerability markets

EN

Information on vulnerabilities and information security threads is very valuable. And, in fact, there is a big market, but it’s neither structured nor liquid. Seriously thinking about this fact leads to a couple of questions: Would we live in a more secure world if every geek could go and sell his exploit at the market price? How could this market eventually be organised? What are the incentives of market participants and where are dangers for conflicts of interest?

Rainer Böhme holds a degree in communication science, economics and computer science. He is researcher in the privacy and …

Blogosphere round-up

EN

It seems like this blog on the preparations for 22C3 already filled a gap: Several blogs commented on our efforts, most of them in German. This brings us to the question why we write this blog in English (or rather: broken English) while the majority of all participants at the Congress will be German or from German-speaking countries.

Almost from the beginning in the 1980s, the Chaos Communication Congress used the sub-title “The European Hacker Party”. What this meant in reality was that among all the German hackers you’d find the occasional guy or girl from Austria, Switzerland or the …

Collateral Damage

EN

Without powerful spam filters nothing goes nowadays. This is no new insight for most of us, since the amount of unsolicited commercial e-mail gets more and more each day. But filtering communication always has unwanted side effects. Peter Eisentraut, developer, IT consultant and author of a book regarding spam and virus fighting with Open Source tools, will talk about consequences for the overall stability, performance and usability of the email system in general. He has been involved in some large installations for German companies and government agencies, so he made some very interesting …

Data Retention

EN

2005 was the year where some of our biggest privacy related nightmares became true. 4 years after 9/11 and a couple of months after the bombings of London everything seems possible in the name of public safety. Some decisions were made without any democratic legitimation like passports with biometric characteristics and RFID or area-wide deployment of video surveillance. Beside that the European ministers of Justice and the European Commission want to keep all telephone and internet traffic as well as the telephone positioning data of all 450 million Europeans. A numerous amount of supporting …

Talk on RFID/librfid

EN

Another important technology which isn’t brand new but implies a big impact here and now is RFID. RFID is used for automatic identification and detection and is i.e. used for logistic purposes to keep track of products on their way from manufacturers to customers. But this technique also has privacy concerns since it’s used in modern passports or even in tickets for the Soccer World Championships in Germany next year, which isn’t funny at all. So it’s important to understand how it works and what exactly can be done with it. The main problem by now is, that a detailed knowledge of the …

VoIP at 22C3

EN

Not only since the acquisition of Skype by eBay this year Voice-over-IP is a hot topic. VoIP uses packet-swichted networks for data flow instead of traditional dedicated, circuit-switched voice transmission lines, so it has some of the usual security implications plus a few more and it also rises the usual longings from governments to intercept this traffic. Although the different techniques and implementations are more or less well known by now, there are still many things to look after.

First of all we’ll have an overview over the intentions of regulating VoIP and NGN (Next Generation …

First Reactions from our Speakers

EN

In the last week we informed all the people who submitted a talk for the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress about the decisions of the program committee. Just in case: If you submitted a lecture to the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress and got no email from the program committee about our decision please write an email to 22c3-content _at_ cccv.de and let us know. We are quite sure we forgot no one, but thanks to the Verpeilungsfaktor we never know.

As you can read for example

here
, here and here some speakers are quite exited to hold a talk at the congress. As every year we refused some talks …

Structure of the Conference

EN

Last year we heard lots of complaints about too many interesting things going on at the same time, too many talks missed because of people oversleeping and too many people squeezing in small lecture halls. So we decided to change some things.

First of all there is the fourth day, which gives us the possibility to invite more interesting talks and gives you the chance to listen to more of them without the need of time travel or astral projections. Second the conference program starts at noon and ends at midnight. That provides one hour more sleep to all of us, so everyone can be brighter than …

Fahrplan Statistics

EN

The program committee finished the main part of its work at the last weekend of October. While the sun was shining over Berlin we pushed lots and lots pieces of paper over the floor of the cccb to create the perfect Fahrplan. There is no better user interface when it comes to multi player multi tasking fahrplan construction. As in the last year the program will be marvelous and we will present lots of interesting speakers and talks in this weblog.

But first some numbers about this years Fahrplan: We received nearly 300 lecture submissions and selected about the half of them for the conference …

Notes on “Private Investigations”

EN

This year’s Chaos Communication Congress’s motto is “Private Investigations”. Thinking of private investigators, the first thing that may come to your mind is the image of a hard boiled yet well-intentioned guy in a trench coat who solves problems in his own special way, as depicted in film-noir classics, such as The Maltese Falcon starring Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade. The lone wolf, the rōnin, the mysterious guy working on his own are well-established metaphors the media has repeatedly used when describing hackers. As with many things that happen when media realities and …

Welcome to CCC Events

EN

This is the new CCC Events blog. It’s a in the footsteps of last year’s 21C3 Weblog and is primarily intended to provide in-depth and up-front information on the upcoming “22C3: Private Investigations” conference.