Talks

The Chaos Communication Congress is the Chaos Computer Club’s (CCC) annual symposium and hacker party.

Congress is the longest-running IT security conference in Germany, the biggest European hacker gathering and has grown into one of the most important conferences on digital transformation. We focus on topics such as information technology, digital security, making, and breaking. We engage in creative, sceptical discourse on the interaction between technology and society.

There are three lecture halls: Saal 1, Saal G “Grace Hopper“, and Saal Z “Konrad Zuse”. You can find the schedule either in the main talk schedule that only lists the talks, or in the combined schedule at the Hub which combines all events at 39C3.

Tracks

39C3’s lectures are organized by tracks, each track is curated by a team of experts in the respective field.

Art & Beauty

Something went wrong with the reboot! Art & Beauty, Art & Culture, whatever you call it, was gravely affected in the last power cycle. Blue screen of death, red ring, ████, cracked gorilla glass, this thing is totally kaput. While some glorified chatbot puts you on hold on the service center helpline (what? It’s not supposed to do that!) we want to invite you to transform that anger, to take a breath and reflect on a thoughtful talk, playful presentation, or lecture performance. We want to see how you destroy things, makeput them new together, dissect, disturb, distort, and ███████. Shit, this froze again.

Please submit for yourself and more importantly: please persuade and support your favorite artist, curator, or critic to present her/their work and the idea behind it at congress 2025. Thank you.

Nota Bene: all pure performances, DJ sets, electric wazoo concerts, baroque stage plays, etc. should apply at the Call for Music. We do the more talky artsy stuff. Or ███████.

Chaos Community Creations

For the new track Chaos Community Creations, we are looking for contributions from the community for the community: Are you planning a big new Chaos event? Have you implemented a mega-exciting project in your local hack space? Have you established a fruitful cooperation with groups, clubs, or associations outside of Chaos?

Then submit a proposal to us! We are looking forward to all the things you would like to share with the community!

Ethics, Society & Politics

The Ethics, Society & Politics track is looking for critical, subversive, but also hopeful perspectives on technology and society.

As crises pile up and the political, social, and ecological climate becomes harsher day by day, we need to talk: What can we do when our scope for action appears to be narrowing? How can hackerdom and civil society contribute when total surveillance powers are constantly being touted, right-wing populism dominates the discourse, and the 'AI' hype further fuels the climate catastrophe?

True to the motto 'Power Cycles – Restart Everything' we call for presentations that break down existing power dynamics and illustrate how we can effectively counteract (global) crises. Join us for a trip to our roots and let's figure out together how we might pool our strengths as a community and put them to good use. We want old and new approaches to form alliances, foster solidarity, and act with foresight. Can we turn it off and on again?

Hardware

The track Hardware is all about development and creative use of things that allow the digital to make an impression on the physical.

On the one hand our focus is on the whole process from architecture, planning, creation and debugging of everything ranging from textiles, musical instruments, robots, integrated circuits, means of transportation for people and Club Mate, launching stuff into space, alternative energy supplies to medical tools, toys and smartphones — all things hands-on.

On the other hand we are interested in unintended use cases. So please tell us your stories about expansion or repair of technology and about liberation of proprietary systems—from decapped smart-cards over firmwares of your coffee machine to modified agricultural engines. How many power cycles did it take to get your project working? We want to hear about it.

Of course we're also up for a surprise: Please submit all the things we can't imagine!

Science

Scrutiny is at the core of science. So, we’re wondering: How do we value fact based research, if people prefer probable search results over correct ones? How does it change our understanding of correlation and causation, if we replace studies with their automated summaries? If we stop writing and start generating, how reliable is our tale of discovery? In short: How do we react to science slop?

Our answer: by giving the stage to the people who do research, understand, investigate or explain the world. Share with us your insights, your surprising conclusions and your passion for understanding the inner workings of things. We want to see your talks – on the linguistics of machines, the behavioural patterns of chatbots, the biology of red giants and the tectonics of lasagna. We want your proposals for the science track. Send us your submissions from research institutions, universities, hack spaces, living rooms and garages. If you bring new findings on exciting topics, explain complex ideas like no one else or ask the questions that nobody is asking – then you have come to the right track

Security

The security track showcases the influence of IT security aspects on users and machines. We welcome technical submissions covering hardware or software.

If you have developed new solutions to previously unsolved problems, or you have found new challenges which we knew nothing about and you want to share your discoveries with thousands of fellow security enthusiasts, then we invite you to present.

This includes topics from mathematics, networks, operating systems, web technologies, memory (mis)management, cryptography, programming languages, hardware design and other fields.

Listen to talks in your language

Most talks will be either in English or German, the Schedule will tell you, for each talk, the language it will be presented in.

The interpreters from c3lingo will translate all German talks into English, and probably all English talks into German. In addition, many talks will be translated into another language, like French, Spanish, Polish, or even Schwytzerdütsch.

To listen to the translations, visit mumble.c3lingo.org and select the hall you are in and the audio you would like to hear: the original as spoken by the presenters, English/German (translation-1), or a third language option (translation-2).

Join the audio channel through your phone or laptop using a web browser, the Mumble Desktop Client or find a mobile Mumble App. If possible, please connect your headphones via cable. This will make your audio more stable and free bandwidth for others that have to use Bluetooth.

Interpreted languages will be announced by c3lingo using Mastodon. You can find more information at wiki.c3lingo.org.