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Talks
The Chaos Communication Congress is the Chaos Computer Club’s (CCC) annual symposium, hacker party, and platform for technology, society and civil rights.
During four days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, thousands of people get together in Hamburg to exchange ideas, listen to each other, learn from each other, build things together, and party together.
The Congress is deliberately a non-commercial, self-organized space and has by now become the longest-running German IT security conference, the biggest European hacker gathering, and one of the central places for engaging with the societal, political, and cultural implications of digitalization.
We focus on information technology, networks, and computer security as well as science, art, culture, society, and politics. At the heart of the Congress is a critical and creative approach to technology and the question of how we can shape its development and its impact on our society ourselves.
Tracks
40C3’s lectures are organized by tracks, each track is curated by a team of experts in the respective field.
Art, Culture and Beauty
Model citizens should behave: be measurable, predictable, optimizable, corruptible--and best of all, they should also save democracy. The track Art, Culture and Beauty is interested in all those who want to find the cracks in the common model. We are looking for lectures, lecture performances and reports on artistic works and research that show the body as training data, as a catwalk, as a score, or that lock themselves exactly against it. That tell what rituals, practices, and systems arise when communities escape their modelling or appropriate it. Make unheard-of future models or dismantle monitoring systems and cut a good figure in the process.
Please submit your own contributions and - more importantly - convince and support your favourite artists, curators or critics to present their work and the ideas behind it at the Congress 2026. Thank you!
PS: All full-fledged performances, DJ sets, Krrrk-bsss-fiep concerts, baroque operas etc. please apply to the Call for Music/Punk/Art. We only do the things that can be realized in the lecture program of the 40C3.
Chaos Community Creations
The track Chaos Community Creations is back and of course the community is in focus once again!
Hackers have never been particularly good model citizens. We don't read manuals, we rewrite them. We don't ask what a system should do, we ask what else it might be capable of. And that's exactly what makes us, in a world that is increasingly optimised for conformity and predictability, a strange anachronism or the most important counterculture that exists right now.
Show us how you forge your reality: Present projects that show spine, report on extraordinary collaborations that no one saw coming, introduce events that may never have happened before. What moved you or what did you move in the chaos bubble? Share it with us and other Model Chaos Citizens, submit it to the CCC Track! By the community, for the community.
Entertainment
Whether it's a game show, gala, glitch battle or singing contest: We want to laugh, get excited and feel amazed together when the curtain rises. That’s why we’re looking for formats — big and small — that combine humour and seriousness at 40C3, and that will keep the popcorn warm and the mate cold.
So slip on your glitter hoodie and submit your ideas in the Entertainment track, whether it's a well-established entertainment format or a brand new idea. Don't forget to tell us what you need to bring your plans to the stage. Also, please specify how much time you will need – for an evening show, this could be more than 60 minutes!
Ethics, Society & Politics
The Ethics, Society & Politics track is seeking visions, analyses, and concrete actions.
Citizenship has become an increasingly restrictive category; we are now living in a world where tech empires rule, track, surveil and manipulate; and "Are you human?" has become an actual question rather than a running gag. Under the motto "Model Citizens", we call for presentations that break with the concept and explore what lies beyond both models and citizenship.
The collection, processing, and exploitation of data are moving a surveilled society to a repressive society. We now need to unlearn what hasn't worked in the past, practice new tactics and develop new visions. How do we build systems that allow autonomy instead of determining behavior? How do we fight excessive surveillance infrastructure? How do we act with true solidarity in increasingly hostile environments?
Join us to discuss and present brave ideas that help all of us remain autonomous, curious, and harder to classify. Let's figure out together how we can disobey and build systems that cater us, not them.
Hardware
The track Hardware is all about the 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 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 also 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 firmware of your coffee machine to modified agricultural machinery (please tell us early if you want to bring one).
Science
Things used to be a lot funnier. But still – or maybe precisely because of that – we need research and its stories. We need hope, we need knowledge, we need that moment when everything clicks. That’s why we’re asking you to submit your talks: the most exciting, surprising, funny, beautiful, or extraordinary presentations about research, from science, and from researchers of every kind.
Together with you, we want to dive into niches, turn over stones, understand models, and delight in the diversity of research topics. Show us your science-based answers to big and small problems, show us findings you never expected, and answer questions we didn’t even know we had. We want to see your talk in the Science Track and explicitly invite those to submit who otherwise see themselves underrepresented on stages.
Security & Hacking
The security track showcases the influence of IT security aspects on users, machines and society, exploring and challenging the technical boundaries of our freedom.
We welcome technical submissions covering hardware or software.
Do you want to share your discoveries with thousands of fellow security enthusiasts? Have you developed new solutions to previously unsolved problems, or uncovered new challenges we knew nothing about? Have you found ways to bypass rules, control and trust?
We invite you to present them.
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.