Feedback

From 24C3 Public Wiki

Jump to: navigation, search

Review to the 24c3. Please keep in mind that this is a congress made by volunteers. Maybe this time this feedback page could be viewed in December 2008 by the next orga team (those for the 25C3), to learn from Problems. 24C3 had many of the same problems 23C3 had(and even more), from the point of an "Angel"(or "voluntary helper").

  • Having read 23C3 Feedback I still wonder what wasn't fixed this year. You could for example edit my talk page...BugBlue 11:05, 3 January 2008 (CET)

Contents

Network

Streaming

  • Is there no streaming of workshops due to lack of capacity or is it a decision based on principle? I would have like to watch them, as workshops are not attendable by everyone and there's always the one talk you definitely don't want to miss while the workshop you want to attend runs at the same time..

It brings up a couple of difficulties:

  • You need at least 2 angels all the time there when workshops are planned
  • You need someone who can film without a stative since not all things can be seen on a beamer

Combine those 2 and you got a difficult task....

    • We have got Image stabilizers for that nowadays.


  • Again, great work. Except for the hassle with the first talks in S2 and S3 - and of course the skipped porn talk, everything went fine. Considering the situation the last years, this was quite a miracle. Thanks to FeM for the great recording and streaming work and thanks to Fefe for the fast encoding of the conference records --Ana 15:20, 4 January 2008 (CET)

WLAN

is it just me or did the aruba APs work much better than these LED blinkers this year? Someone said the arubas are now forbidden because of 202c?? I want them back!

WLAN in Saal 1 never worked well for me. Maybe because of the high usercapacity. WLAN in Saal 2 and 3 worked very well most of the time, also speedy, if there are not too much people walking around ;)

Seems that WLAN wasn't really stable this year, but last year it was nearly the same.

For me, the WLAN went 1a. Even when Saal1 was crowded I had like always more than 1kB/sec.

It worked really great for me (5GHz). Even in Saal1 I always had about 2MB/sec.

Had also no trouble with 802.11a and Peg-DHCP. Only the usual break downs from time to time.

Improvement for next year: woud be nice if there will be "n"-network :D

Starting from day 2 I had working WLAN almost all the time. 802.11b/g in Saal1, the hackcenter, the lounge and most of the time the crew room. (little hint: you can sign) BugBlue 21:38, 1 January 2008 (CET)

Wired LAN

Worked great!

  • Why didn't the ethernet plugs on the walls work?

Talks

Please give first Feedback to talks in the Fahrplan. Use this page rather as a place for discussion.

Day 1

What is terrorism?

  • Very informative and professional talk. It was most interesting to hear from someone who was hit by Germany's new anti-terrorist measures.

Design Noir

  • Quite informative with very good examples. Happened to be a funny and entertaining talk.
  • Terrific talk, hands-on topic presented in a funny and entertaining way, Limor did just a great job. Hope to see her again next year.

Crouching Powerpoint, Hidden Trojan

  • Not too in-depth so that everyone could understand. Very informative on how people proceed who actually use these viruses.

DNS Rebinding And More Packet Tricks

  • Dan Kaminsky... enormously funny and staggeringly clever guy—a must-see.
  • Dan ist just hillarious. I never understand more than at best 50% of what the fuck he is talking about but I'm still enjoying every one of his talks.

I can count every star...

  • That was really great. Monochrom should plan all the evenings next year.
definitely, that was just great. Ryu
  • Classic monochrome. Just the music selection kind of sucked, but alas I'm not a fan of Schlager

VX

  • Stupid talk and not a bit competent. Next year there should be throwing tomatoes against those idiots. Was really a pain, the ugliest talk of the whole congress.
  • That topic surely is interesting. But the speaker missed the point in explaining what a 'white hat' makes and why on earth coding viruses is a way of expressing your feelings/spirit/mind/whatever. Just can't see that.
  • Unstructured and chaotic in a way that is not funny anymore. Had hoped for more.
  • Who was that guy? I mean he has java rm -rf files as proof on concept virus on his personal website. Strange "underground" groups... Couldn’t lose the feeling they found themselves a very bad representative. Maybe it’s time for a "What we really meant to say talk" next year or this VX´ers are just 1337 and hate all noobs around....

Cancelled Talks on Day 1

  • There were at least 2 Talks that were Cancelled on Day 1 in Saal 2. ( Maybe even more !?? ) AES and IPv6. Does anybody know what has happened to them ? There were some "AES is undead" signs around that told of something in the Workshop Room. Wasn't it earlier stated that there sholud be no talks in the Workshop room? Now there is not even a recording of that talk.
    • There were three talks cancelled in total, all on day 1. Reasons: The speaker for the AES talk had some problems with his slides (I don't have the full details) and thus couldn't speak in his assigned time slot, that's why he relocated to a slot in the workshop room (there were no free slots in the schedule at all, and not enough time to swap with a later talk). The speaker for "Verteilte Sicherheit" was initially assigned a different slot (2 hours after the one in the final schedule) and only got shifted 2h earlier right before christmas. He didn't receive the notification email in time and so appeared for his original slot (2h too late for the new slot). That's basically my fault. I'm really sorry for that and will try to avoid similar problems in the future. The speaker for "IPv6: Everywhere they don't want it" had to unexpectedly cancel his trip to Berlin on short notice. All in all the program went rather smoothly this year, IMHO: 3 talks cancelled (1 of which would have been preventable) out of 103, 2 talks swapped with each other, lessons learned (note to self: next time position Dan Kaminsky's talks early in the schedule and Ilja von Sprundel's talks late). --Henryk 05:24, 4 January 2008 (CET)

Day 2

Port Scanning Improved

  • Very good talk. Highly interesting.

Data Retention and PNR

  • The talk contained a lot of information, yet the lack of clear structure and—more importantly—emphasis on key aspects that we need to be aware of, made this one more taxing to understand than necessary.
  • In the interest of the audience and the importance of the topic the speakers should differentiate the important issues from the less important ones more in order to guide the listeners through the matter.

Quantum Cryptography and Possible Attacks

  • Christian Kurtsiefer and Antia Lamas made this talk such an enjoyable one. They managed to convey the complicated matter in an understandable way while keeping us entertained along the way—fantastic!
  • the topic made me write a Haiku:
them strange and charming
yet the very slightest look
is unlike the last

Das Panoptische Prinzip

  • Some very nice movies, especially that Hartz IV/Arbeitslos one and the last piece.
  • Good movies!

To be or I2P

  • I had the fealing the speaker wasn't really sure about the stuff he talked about. The ideas of I2P is still largely unclear to me.

C64-DTV Hacking

  • Good talk, cool speaker! (he really knew what he was talking about!)

DIY Survival

  • Slides?
  • Hillarious, great presentation. Made no sense at all but still very very funny. Hope to see Bre again next year.

Inside the Mac OS X Kernel

  • Why were there no questions at the end of this talk ? Maybe because Lucy didn't know anything about the subject and only read her notes during the whole talk. Is she an Apple employee ? - Ctrlaltdel 23:55, 2 January 2008 (CET)
  • Excruciatingly biased talk with a deluge of half-truths.
  • Somebody asked for Lucy's job. She answered she was working. To me the question seemed more like: was she during that talk?
  • [| Amit Singh at 23C3] and:
    TPM isn't that bad you guys
    anoyone?
  • Waste of time, just go watch an apple ad. Same information

Spiel, Freude, Eierkuchen? - Die Gamerszene und ihre Reaktion auf kritische Berichterstattung

  • In diesem Talk ging es ja heiss her. Ich verstehe das als Zeichen, dass auch die CCC-nahe Szene sich über diese Dinge noch uneins ist und es noch viel Diskussionsbedarf gibt. Auch hat es mir gezeigt, dass ich selbst im Zuge der Killerspiel-Schlagwort-Argumentation nicht zwischen dem was ok ist und was es nicht mehr ist unterscheiden kann. --> Prima war auch, dass jemand der von uns 'Gewählten' sich gezeigt hat.
  • Eine absolute Fehlplanung von euch. Es war doch von vorneherein klar, dass zu diesem heißen Thema massig Diskussionsbedarf besteht, den man nicht in einer Stunde abfertigen kann.

Mifare

  • Amazing to see these guys proving once again security by obscurity is not secure no matter how obscure.
  • The amount of information the speakers have had at hand during the talk is simply awesome.

Rule 34 Contest

  • Nice idea. I didn't like the topics too much, though. Could have been more interesting and more weird stuff. Negative: No recordings, no pictures et cetera. What the fuck was that about? Are we afraid of - what?
  • i actually miss a recording of a.b. proclaiming the need for generally more appreciation of cock. and I second that, of coz.
  • Why haven't you streamed or recorded it? The participant names are known, the topic is known and the whole "censoring" of the event suggests more then there is to it in the first place ("got something to hide? oh, maybe there was child pornography" and such shit). If they wanted to protect their image for future employers - too late and hypocritical.

Day 3

Getting Things Done

  • Great talk, great topic. I'm about to become more organised ;)
  • I appreciated the fact there was such a talk. I even managed to see it(!) But, alas, I still did not get a single thing done. So it kind of didn't work out for me. Of course, I did not use those techniques mentioned in the talk, either.
  • A bit incoherent but overall nicly done.

Hacking Heteronormativity

I expected a different topic of the talk based on title and schedule-description. I guess that was the problem for many. Still, I've never seen a speaker at a congress having to face such a harsh audience like the speaker of this talk at its end. Although, as said, I too was disappointed and had difficulties with it, I think he definitely not deserved such an ending, the audience's behavior was very poor.

Hacker Jeopardy

  • On-The-Fly-Translation:
    • Great Idea! Though I was unable to reach the 8101 at all the time. Translation was ok, but what about a native English speaker next year?
    • i would agree on that, there are talks central to the congress held in german. although i won't opt for english only for all talks, having these talks which attract the highest amount of attendees held in english instead of german (see also security nightmares) could improve the congress a lot for international visitors
The language is often discussed as being a problem, but I prefer listening to a very good talk in German, than to a (at most) mediocre talk in English. A possible policy could be for the Orga team to refuse German talks, but I fear some German speakers would then simply try to do their talks in English, with ugly results. --Niere 17:42, 31 December 2007 (CET)
    • Find enough Volunteers and build the "Simultaneous Translation Team". Even if you only manage to translate a few Talks, it's still an improvement and might improve further over the years. With some planning you can get good hardware (like headsets or good microphones) and maybe some sort of wireing to the POC for excellent quality.
  • Get rid of the perl/tk interface or at least test it beforehand. Configuring the *BSD X during the show is just shitty. Then you dont have to rush through the finals because time is running out.
  • Some replies (is this intended here? But where else? Let's discuss... :) - by Ray
    • Delay/Timing: The perl/tk interface, as well as the overengineered gamehardware (it's basically the muccc-isdn-cryptohardware) of course were tested before, and basically worked flawlessly. On-Stage setup always needs a few minutes due to all the cables etc. The start in the first place was delayed because someone searched for our "Herold" which was missing... Yes, Sec fucked up his X config, that's true. I asked him before, he said nothing changed from last year, obviously he was wrong. Lamer. But the real rush came from the fact that for some reason only a one hour slot was assigned, so we really really really had to be off the stage at 1 AM for financial reasons (building crew). We're really sorry for that! We had to decide to leave out one round or hurry everything up, we decided for the hurry, possibly that was a mistake.
    • Language: It's hard to make it right for everybody. We did it in english, and native german speakers (still the largest part of the audience) said it was funnier in german. We did it mixed (2/2 rounds) and english speakers complained it was announced english and left before the start. So we went back to german only, but the feedback page tells us "presentation" was better last year. Whatever :)
    • Translation: That was organized completely during the Congress by... let's just call him Mr. X :). Big thanks to him and of course to the translator(s) (and the POC and everybody else who made it possible, I heared there even was a second audio channel in the DVB broadcast?). It was really cool that it worked, and I think it was a complete novelity for the congress?

Agenten des Bösen

  • Great talk. The speaker was very funny and looked a bit like Sigmund Freud.
  • Too much empha


Grundlagen der sicheren Programmierung

  • The speaker had a really insecure behavior, but he surely knew what he was talking about. So I think it wasn't perfect but good. Only competence counts.

Space Communism

  • Typical boring Kulla talk...

Day 4

Ruby on Rails Security

  • Nice one.
  • I was actually surprised about how fluently the speakers english was and how well he presented such a nontrivial topic. Considering the low expectations I had for this event: Kudos.

One Token to Rule Them All

  • Never before heared of that metasploit insanity. Great.

Unusual Web bugs

  • Nice talk and very interesting things, but it simply was too fast to really understand it. I hope there will be a recording.

I know who you clicked last summer

  • Too theoretical, not a single example during the talk. At least one example would have made the talk really interesting, but it rather sounded like a recycled Master Thesis presentation...

Closing event

  • The font that was used in the NOC-presentation was really hard to read.

Lightning Talks

  • we need at least one moderator/host, who knows the keyboard shortcuts to his/her laptop.

    I don't want to pick on Hannes, but I don't know what he wanted to proof with this stupid confugured Macbook?

    Every owner of Apple Laptops was ashamed seeing Hannes perfom his Macbook. He did'nt know what to do or he wasn't interested - I don't know what, but either was very very annoying.

  • I was also very angry, that so many people who presented Lightning Talks didn't stick to the very simple rules. The audience should have booooood them for not respecting the audience interest and time visiting the Lightning Talks.

  • We need again more Lightning Talk Days. The Lightning talks on Day 4 took 2.5 hrs. In the end only the (already talked)Talkers Remained, there was almost no audience Remaining. Last year the Lightning Talks were well visited. Also it was a "Pain in the ass" (sorry, it really was) for me at the Camera, getting more and more Bored.
    • Right. I'm very, very sorry that this turned out not so good. We forgot to put lightning talks into the schedule right from the start. Again. I think I can almost guarantee that 25C3 will have properly organized lightning talks scheduled each day, just like 23C3 had, or maybe even better. --Henryk 05:36, 4 January 2008 (CET)
      • Well I actually saw that they were missing on almost every revision of the Fahrplan, but until v1.0 there were still some empty slots in that plan. So I thought they were for the lightning talks. If I see that again next year I will surely tell Anybody I see in charge of planning. Chippy 18:49, 6 January 2008 (CET)

Workshops

POC

worked fine, w/o problems as alwayz.

I agree, the POC is always doing a really great job! Thanks a lot --Niere 17:51, 31 December 2007 (CET)
I want the possibility again to press one for waiting, the original mp3 of the warteschleiffe and of course not my personal number on the 110 phone BugBlue 21:40, 1 January 2008 (CET)

I used the the warteschleiffe quit a lot during the congres for putting people on hold.
okkie 0 ;-p

  • Landline calls never worked really (had the 'Busy'-Text on my phone.. I checked that with my cell phone, the line of my opponent was free). Only 1 of 5 attempts worked. But as it worked, the quality was perfect.
  • Was it even planned to be able to call outsiders? It didn't work the whole time. I tried it often.
  • Was nice except the Wardialler, or whatever that was, that called everyone.It could have been stopped earlier.
    • Oh yes, please no wardialer next year, or at least a clearly marked opt-out option. (And everyone: If you feel you really need to use a text-to-speech system, please use one that is can be understood even in loud environments.) --Henryk 05:39, 4 January 2008 (CET)
      • Next wardialer who puts 110 in his list is being hunted (in coordination with the POC,NOC and powercrew). That's a promise. BugBlue 10:21, 4 January 2008 (CET)

Conference Recordings

Congratulations to FeM for the excellent live streams and as-good-as-live recordings (official and others). You rock! The small issues with rooms 2+3 you mentioned yourselves.. -- Relet

Live streaming was great. Really. Now we need commenting via VoiP and DECT and live chat while the talks are running. And public viewing outside of the main room, because there were again far too less seats in them.

  • Asking questions via IRC seems like a good idea, I've seen this on other conferences.

It's very nice, that the recordings are online so early. Big THX to FeFe, FEM and all who helped to get the stuff online. Thanks, you are great!

  • Yeah, great job.
  • Thanks, Fefe and FEM, very good job. Wish for next year: release the videos on torrent first or at the same time as ftp. Maybe the Opentracker people could help, too. With torrent there is no "is this mirror up to date?" issue and seeding is easier than setting up a ftp mirror.
  • Again, as last year, the Recordings are scaled down to 640x480. Stay at Pal. Do not scale. If you really need that Resolution, although there is no reason, cut the edges away. DO NOT SCALE DOWN !
  • There were HDV Cameras in Saal 1. Why didn't we record in HDV ? At least recordings(if not Streams) in 720i/720p would have been nice.(The Cam's were capable of 1080i)
  • To All TALKERS : Next time make the life of the livecut/camera ppl (aka Videoengel) easier. Preset your Laptop to 1024x768 @ 60Hz. Other stuff might still be shown on the VideoProjector (denglisch: Beamer) but it won't pass through the scanconverter into the CVBS(FBAS)-Stream to the outerworld(that is DVB-T & Recordings & InternetStream).

bcc / facilities

catering

  • Catering was pretty good for being catering. -- Relet
  • Those catering guys sucked extremely. A bunch of offensive jocks. At least they did their job.
  • The catering people were really unfriendly at some times of the day.
I agree. Once I only wanted a Pizza and they were interested on CCC history. So I had to talk about BTX, NASA/KGB hacks and Lockpicking with 3 of them and my Pizza got cold. From my point of view the situation was much better than on 23c3. The burgers and pizza were good, but still expensive.
  • It is obvious that they make fun about people like us. You could feel it everywhere. They think we are crazy and ill. But it's okay, most of the time I think the same about people with their kind of education and kind of living (fast cars, holiday, flatscreen TV, blond girlfriend with big boobs etc.)
  • Speaking other languages than German was better this your as far as I noticed it. Wittnessed several orders by other 24C3 visitors and it worked. At least with this they improved regarding last years congress :-)
  • having idiots serve the meals was a pain, probably that's one of the reaons why there rarely were waiting queues this year. i for one much rather went out to eat than buying at the bcc-lounge. food quality was ok, though.
  • Aggressive, unfriendly people. Never again.
  • Quiet unfriendly, we went out to other places to get our drinks / food for less money.
  • You overrate this guys. At least now you know the kind of people which vote for Schäuble personal. ;-)

power

  • i really would appreciate more power sockets in the conference rooms.. you always had to be there way ahead of time to get a seat with some sort of power socket nearby. I know that too many cables would suck very much, but not all of us can (or want to) buy expansive new notebooks that last hours w/o power connection..
    • Power to the people! There are more plugs needed everywhere.
    • you should go into the hackcenter if you want to use your notebook. I think the conference rooms would become some sort of hackcenter (like the rear seats in saal1) if there was power and wired network. Anyway, some more sockets in the submarine would have been nice.
  • I tripped over power cables in the conference rooms twice. Therefore I suggested at the info desk that they'd better turn off the public power supplies which entice people into creating dangerous loops with their cords. Maybe there could be "calculating desks" for those who want to use a line-powered laptop in the conference rooms.
  • The people using their Laptops in Saal 2/3 constantly were nagging me at the Camera/videomixer to use an empty power outlet, although there were none. Eighter give them many many outlets, or write somewhere that there are no outlets available in that both lecture rooms.

toilets

the new "mode" of completetly blocking the whole toilet to clean it was pretty annoying. On the other hand, cleaning them so often was very good. At least they did their job.

-toilets for women should be opened for the society-called-guys-nerds to avoid queue

Simple: Just use them. (Hey, women don't hesitate using ours on other events, don't they?)
Well, you cannot simply say 'do it', because women do it on other events. You have to give some arguments like "for redundancy" and "dynamic resource allocation"... ;) This topic has no real chances on success.
Ohw man, waiting about 2 minutes (press **#**0080 on you phone for the waiting music while waiting) for dumping some core is not that bad at the bussiest times of the day BugBlue

- There was an average wait time of about 15 min.. that was really _TOO_ long

Miscellany

  • I haven't seen a map of the building printed anywhere. But maybe that was just me. If I wasn't, I'd suggest more maps, so that you get to know all the things that happen, and all the different hacking corners. -- Relet
You should have looked at the Infodesk.
Or there should have been more Maps?
  • Where were the Lockpickers, will they ever return to the congress with an own room ?

Smoking

  • There were way too few ppl smoking on Levels B and C. The air was way too fresh so I had to smell all Stinkegeeks. A More-smoking-policy would be better in the future.
Jesus, why didn't you _TOLD_ them that they stink? Never heard of social engineering, or what? Never heard of how fast male nerds can be transformed into something not smelling or something not so ugly only if somebody, especially a girl, tells them? Use your imagination and creativity for God's sake and _DO_ something instead of complaining afterwards. Argh!
Haha, you didn't get that the stingygeek-thing is just a funny way of still holding up some critique of the no-smoking-policy enforced since 2006(?). Argh :)
  • I completely agree, Volldampf Voraus!
  • Sure. "Stinkegeeks" are anoing. But this is mostly a local problem, just move around a bit. Smoking at all is from my point of view a bad idea and more a "global" problem. Hopefully smoking will be kept out furthermore.
  • I appreciated the fact there was a smoking lounge nearby the hackcenter.

crowdedness

  • I found this year extremely relaxed. While two years ago I felt that the bcc capacity had reached its absolute limit, this year there was plenty of space, one did not had to wait for catering nor even toilets. Also there always was a nice spot to sit and relax. Possibly there just were too few attendees - althouth i doubt that.

It sometimes was really hard to find a place with wired network and power sockets. Especially in the long pauses.

  • I also liked it, that it wasn't so crowded. Last year I thought that we need a far bigger building than the bcc and that the bcc has reached its limit way too much.
  • And I also liked that groups like the Pyonen brought a lot of Sofas to the Congress.
    Can this be intensified in 2008 at the 25C3 and if yes, how? Should we visitors make some kind of donation before the congress to let the CCCV buy used Sofas for the congress??????
    • More sofas are definatley required. Would be great if this could be organized somehow.
    • As I know the sofas arent from the pyonen this year. Most of them were collected here in berlin by a group around sva and harko who drived them through berlin since weeks. Another big bunch is from wim and his obenbsd group who genourously let us place them in the engine room and the rest comes from k:ita. Donating money is probably a good idea to have more sofas, but collecting, driving and storing them is the real issue. Maybe next year additional people volunteer to fetch them here in berlin weeks in advance. If someone is interested in that job or know another group who is willing to lend some sofas please let the orga know.

Privacy

Privacy concerns.

Photos / Videos

  • I found it really annoying that many people just used their cellphones / digital cameras to randomly take pictures of the audience around them. I think it's okay if they photograph the speakers (this is on the video anyway), but I think we should rise more awareness in this area again. Most of the time the photographers ran away before you could talk to them in order to delete your picture from their camera / phone. A few years ago anyone who took photos at the congress was beaten down with a sludge hammer! ;-)
    • I fully agree. It was very annoying. Even at the demonstration...
      • At the congress - agree. It's an annoying illness of our times that everybody seems to have the impression of having the right to take a picture of everything and everyone any time. Not only at the congress, but also at concerts etc. But complaining about photographs at a public demonstration is ridiculous. Being noticed is the goal of a demonstration, and nobody notices a demonstration if nobody takes pictures, videos etc. of it. And a demonstration is an act of "here I am and that's what I am stand for". So, if you don't want to be seen at a demonstration, don't visit one. BTW, the cops are going to film you anyway. :-P
  • I found it very annoying that every time I took a picture of some hardware (like a switch, an accesspoint or whatever) almost everybody who saw the light from my camera came to me and said "You have to delete that picture if I'm on it". Grow up and learn that the most people at the congress now know the rules, especially the guys with bigger camera's. And for the rest of this complaining about pictures: Walk to foebud, buy yourself a black beam or whatever and don't walk up front in a demonstration. If you want some good press coverage nowadays about demonstrations you have to accept the fact that they will take pictures and publish them together with your viewpoints. You can't have all at once (however; it's a nice objective).

Superbertram

  • I also want to complain about Superbertram. I think it's a really really cool idea to rise awareness regarding surveillance etc., but I'm not happy with the random placement of Superbertram in the congress audience without any warning. There are many images of people like me on flickr now (and maybe other places?) who did not know for several days what Superbertram is actually used for, and I really don't like having my pictures on flickr...
  • Maybe the availability of a project with such a big influence should be mentioned at the opening ceremony in order to "warn" everybody. I discussed this with several of my colleagues and they were not aware of Superbertram even after the congress has ended and just found out that their pictures are also available via flickr.
  • Also I like the strange appearance of Superbertram, I still don't like to get filmed. Stick it in the pooper.

More stuff

See Suggestions.

Retrieved from "http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Feedback"
Personal tools
Archived page - Impressum/Datenschutz