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.

You know a person is of a certain importance when there is a Wikipedia entry dedicated to him or her. [Bert Bos][1] is such a person. Working for the [W3C][2], Bert Bos is one of the minds behind [CSS][3], 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 …

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).

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][1] ist …

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 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 …

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.

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.

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.

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 …

Okay, okay. It’s not pretty (we will change that), but we wanted to get the stuff out of the door. The 22C3 website is up. It contains all necessary information on the congress. Browse through the schedule or participate in other ways….

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!

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 …