leipzig on CCC Event Blog

37C3: current status

Sat, 06 Jun 2020 00:49:01 +0000

TL;DR: We will probably know in October whether and how the Congress will take place in Leipzig this year.

Dear Community.

This year so far has been a very chaotic one for most of us. The future, as we saw in March, can change faster than we would like to imagine. There is still half a year until the usual congress date, but because of our current situation and in order to prevent rumours, we want to be transparent this year, so that you can adapt to different situations.

The initial planning for a 37C3 has begun. After initial talks it became clear that Leipzig Trade Fair is the only reasonable option for us this year. This means that the 37C3 will take place in Leipzig – if it does as a physical event.

At the moment we cannot assess whether the 37C3 is feasible at all. Even if it should become legally possible, we know about the special responsibility towards our participants. In order to fulfil this responsibility, our CERT is involved in the evaluation of the situation.

We expect the situation to be clear enough by October at the latest to make a reasonable decision for this event. This explicitly means that we must keep all options open – including pushing back 37C3 to 2021. As soon as there is a final decision, it will be published on this blog as usual.

Stay healthy, everybody!

Photo by Kuma Kum on Unsplash

36C3 Phone registration is open

Sun, 01 Dec 2019 22:42:54 +0000

We are pleased to inform you that even with Resource Exhaustion the registration of telephone extensions for the 36th Chaos Communication Congress is open. Don’t get confused by the social media, it works without any voucher :-). You can claim your DECT, SIP or GSM extension in the Generic User Registration Utility (GURU). Like last year, you can register your devices on site yourself. Don’t forget your devices and chargers, chasing records, this year we want to break last year’s 6488 extensions.

Stay connected!

Press accreditation to #35C3

Thu, 06 Dec 2018 15:03:02 +0000

As you might have noticed by now, the 35th installment of Chaos Communication Congress titled „Refreshing Memories“ will open doors in Leipzig, Germany, December 27-30th, 2018.

We welcome members of the press on grounds and would kindly ask you to request prior press accreditation. To do so, please send your name and the media you will be reporting for via email to press-accreditation@cccv.de. If you plan to take pictures or record videos as part of you reporting, that’s no problem in general, but accreditation is mandatory in that case. Please add a line telling us what your plans are.

Be sure to submit your request for press accreditation before December 16th, 2018 – and only to the address above. We’ll be glad to answer any questions by e-mail and are looking forward to welcome you at 35C3.

Photo by Yukiko Matsuoka under (CC BY 2.0).

35C3: Call for Participation and Submission Guidelines

Tue, 11 Sep 2018 15:50:08 +0000

35C3 – 35th Chaos Communication Congress
December 27. through 30. 2018, Leipziger Exhibition Grounds, Leipzig

There also is a tl;dr-diff to the 34c3 CfP.

The Event

The Chaos Communication Congress is the Chaos Computer Club’s (CCC) annual symposium and hacker party. During four days between Christmas and New Years Eve, thousands of hackers, technology freaks, artists, and utopians get together in Leipzig to communicate, learn from each other, and party together. 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.

We’d love to see your submission for one or more of these tracks:

Art & Culture,
Ethics, Society & Politics,
Hardware & Making,
Security,
Science und
Resilience.

Apart from the official conference program, the Chaos Communication Congress also offers space for community assemblies, developer and project meetings, art installations, lightning talks, and workshops.

Foundation Talks

Congress has grown, a lot. Many of the newcomers have a great thirst for knowledge in areas that may seem mundane and basic to others. This is why we will have a focus this year on talks that convey basic knowledge. These talks will receive a clear signifier, so they are easy to recognise. Foundations talks are not only about technical topics. They can be submitted in all tracks. Every track has a number of reserved talk slots for them. It is important that you have real expertise in the subject you want to talk about and have the ability to make it comprehensible for many people. Please note in the submission what approximate level of previous knowledge is required. Submitting a Foundations Talk will not diminish your chances to get accepted with another talk.

Dates & deadlines

October 15th, 2018 (23:59 UTC): Deadline for submissions,
November 12th, 2018: Notification of acceptance,
December 27th – 30th, 2018: Chaos Communication Congress.

Online submissions only

Please submit your lecture to our conference planning system at https://frab.cccv.de/cfp/35c3.
Simply follow the instructions there. If you have any questions regarding the submission, you are welcome to contact us via mail at 35c3-content(at)cccv.de.

Tracks

Art & Culture

This track awaits submissions that address, from an artistic perspective or with artistic means, the societal changes and contradictions caused by computers, the internet, robots, and general digitalization.

One can create art and beauty with computers: We’re also open to lectures that include art installations, performances, concerts, readings, etc., that involve past, contemporary, or upcoming technologies. We will try to help with the organizational side of such lectures as much as possible.

Ethics, Society & Politics

This track is dedicated to the societal, ethical and political questions posed by technology, networks and the digitization of all aspects of life.

What will our technologically enhanced future look like? What are the effects of machine learning, ubiquitous networks, digitalisation of every thing we do, automation, climate change and globalisation? How does society cope with the resulting social and political upheaval? What commercial and political interests are blocking the way forward to utopias worth living? How can we overcome them? Activist, phantastic, solidaric, and non-commercial ideas and concepts are very welcome. If you shape society with positive energy, this is the track for you. Please speak about your practical experiences!

Hardware & Making

This track is all about developing and creatively using things that allow the digital to make a physical impression.

The focus is on creating things of all kinds of (e.g. textiles, musical instruments, robots, alternative energy, medical tools, …), the expansion, repair, and liberation of proprietary systems (from the decapped smart-card to the firmware of your toaster to a modified agricultural machine), the sovereign use of technology, getting your hands dirty, and all the things we can’t imagine yet – and of course rockets!

Security

For this track we are looking for content demonstrating the influence of security aspects on users and machines. We would therefore like to request technical submissions focusing on security problems and solutions in both, hardware and software.

If you want to share your discoveries with thousands of fellow security enthusiasts, if you have developed new solutions to previously unsolved problems, or if you have found new problems which we knew nothing about, then this is the right track for you.

This year we dedicate some of our slots to beginners and people who are interested in the relevant basics. As part of this year’s foundations initiative, we are also looking for submissions with a loose connection to security. This includes topics from mathematics, networks, operating systems, web technologies, memory (mis)management, cryptography, programming languages, hardware design and other fields.

Science

The rapid development of science and technology is steadily changing our view of the world. But that doesn’t only mean that we’re profiting from new technology as a byproduct. We are also increasingly trying to understand the complex relationship between nature and society, in order to comprehend how our actions parameterize this whole system. We see science as a method of reverse engineering the world API and are interested in the newest diffs. No matter whether research centres, universities, or garage-driven science: if you explore and evaluate interesting and important developments from a scientific standpoint, then send us your submissions!

This year we’re especially interested in submissions regarding the phenomenon of climate change in its whole width and complexity. We are interested in everything from sociocultural effects to frost-resistant measurement technology, from the past to the near future, from the depth of the oceans up to the atmosphere. What are the actual effects of the technical and societal systems we have built? What will be the next Dieselgate, and which active approaches towards solving the problems are there?

Resilience

The world is developing at an increasing pace, and most of it involves computers and algorithms. Unfortunately, those developments do not necessarily equal progress. Some increase complexity; others require waiving freedoms. But many projects already incorporate recent research, like p2p gossipping networks (meaning less data accumulates at central points as everyone runs their own infrastructure), extended OS security (reducing persistence, new policies, virtualisation), or reorganised social frameworks intended to simplify life (by eliminating bureaucracy and sources of stress), and, of course, reduction of our dependency on human competition.

In the resilience track all submissions are welcome that lead to a world more worthy of living in – be they long-running projects or recent developments.

Classifiers

As a courtesy to reviewers and your audience, we would like you to also rate your submission by dynamic tags we call “classifiers”. Those help us to better understand the content and what your audience can expect. If, for example, your topics cover both hardware and security, you now can show us on a scale between 0 and 100 per cent – making the classic “tracks” much more fluid. You can also tell us what level of prior knowledge you expect your audience to bring.

Further Program at the 35C3

Lightning talks

Got something interesting to say but don’t want to submit a full talk? Consider doing a lightning talk instead. You will have five minutes to present your idea or project, or to do a rant. A formal submission through frab is not required; as usual, the lightning talks are organized via the public wiki. Lightning talks can be held in German or English and will be streamed, recorded and published (see below).

Assemblies

Assemblies are places where communities around a certain interest can meet, talk, exchange ideas and be inspired. Assemblies play a huge part in creating the special “congress atmosphere.” They are comparable to villages at the Chaos Communication Camp. We will have lots of space, so some bigger installations will be possible.

To further the exchange and the get-together of communities and groups, we will cluster the assemblies at the 35C3 along key subjects. We will link these key subjects to bigger workshop areas / stages / auditoriums which will be available for the assemblies connected to the subject for workshops, self-organized sessions or after talks discussion.

You and your community are interested in adopting a key subject, or your established assembly wants to take care of more space? Then write an email to c3-assemblies@lists.ccc.de and join the effort to create a great congress. Installations with up to 30m² big roofs are possible!

The usual application for assemblies will happen in due time at the public wiki.

For projects, installations, workshops, sessions hosted in assemblies and other fun stuff

A formal submission through frab is not required. There will be a wiki page to keep track of requirements for space and other resources. Simply start already considering now what you would like to make, bring, or show, and write it down once the wiki goes online. We are open to crazy and surprising stuff.

Submission guidelines

Please send us a description of your suggested talk that is as complete as possible. The description is the central criteria for acceptance or rejection, so please ensure that it is as clear and complete as possible. Quality comes before quantity. Due to the non-commercial nature of the event, presentations which aim to market or promote commercial products or entities will be rejected without consideration.

Since most participants find – or don’t find a lecture by its title, it’s important to keep it precise, accessible and comprehensible. Our teams will keep a keen eye on title and subtitle and make suggestions to change them if necessary, so please avoid insider jokes and stereotypes. It would be a shame if we would have to reject an otherwise excellent submission because the title does not tell much about the actual content.

As it is likely that there will be multiple submissions on the same topic, please show us exactly why your talk should be part of the conference. Remember that the teams are diversely staffed, and not every reviewer knows every submitter and their background. Please write something about yourself, your research, and your motivation. It does not matter if the talk has been held at another conference somewhere on this planet, as long as it is up to date and relevant.

Talks should be either 30 minutes long plus 10 minutes for questions and answers or 45 minutes long plus 15 minutes for questions and answers. Longer slots are possible if absolutely necessary, but should be an exception. Please take our limited amount of presentation time into consideration, check how much time you really need to bring home your points and then tell us the proposed length of your talk.

Language

Although the Chaos Communication Congress is an international event and a lot of content is presented in English, there will again be a translation team that will simultaneously translate most German talks into English. So if you are not comfortable with presenting in English, don’t hesitate to present your lecture in German. If your talk will be held in English, your submission should also be in English.

Publication

Audio and video recordings of the lectures will be published in various formats under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. This license allows commercial use of excerpts by media institutions as part of their reporting. If you do not wish for material from your lecture to be published or streamed, please let us know in your submission.

Note: As German law (and therefore the license) might differ from the law of your country, please let us know if you have any issues or questions regarding the exact implications. Unfortunately, we can’t guarantee a perfect translation.

Travel, costs & visa

The Chaos Communication Congress is a non-commercial event where neither the organisers nor the speakers are being paid. As an accepted speaker for a full talk, you get free admission, though. If necessary, we are able to provide limited support for travel costs. If you need help applying for a visa, such as an official invitation to present to the German embassy, please make sure to let the content team know well in advance. Please be aware that the visa application procedure may take up to six weeks.

Bild von HDValentin.

Phone infrastructure at 34C3

Thu, 21 Dec 2017 16:38:28 +0000

Needless to say, we will provide to you a phone infrastructure at Leipzig. Please do not forget to bring your DECT and mobile phone with you (and the correct charger, maybe even a headset if you have one). The congress is hosted in Leipzig for the first time, really the biggest congress location ever and maybe we have some unknown constraints. We are prepared for this big event with up to four system components (in Hamburg we had one) and up to 60 antennas (in Hamburg we had 45). We try our best to provide a comprehensive DECT network, but can’t promise because of the unknown building. If you want a fallback, register a SIP extension and use a SIP Client e.g. with your smartphone.

We apologize for the very long waiting times to register your DECT phone. Technically it is not possible to speed up or process in parallel, but we will try a new solution called PoC-Q. You can push a button and get a queue ticket. Via a website you can check your position in queue and the estimated waiting time. Hence you can use your valuable time with whatever you want instead of waiting in PoC Help-/ Registration desk line in the glass hall. If you want to find out if your DECT device is compatible with the POC-PBX, have a look on the DECT Phone Compatibility List in the Eventphone Wiki or send us a tweet (@eventphone).

What about mobile phone network (GSM/UMTS)? You can assume that there will be a GSM/UMTS Network but very experimental. The GSM team give everything to setup the mobile network, but we cannot estimate how big and which frequencies. At the PoC we will install a dashboard with the current network status and we push the important news via twitter. 5000 blank, unlabeled SIM Cards will be available and we sell them at the PoC (CCL Level 0) from 26.12.2017, 11:00 a.m. Update: You can reuse SIM-Cards from past chaos events.

DECT, SIP and GSM/UMTS extensions can be registered in the Generic User Registration Utility (Guru).

Be a part of 34C3: Become an Angel in our System!

Thu, 30 Nov 2017 22:24:29 +0000

If you asked yourself: How can a chaotic hacker event like the Chaos Communication Congress run so smoothly for so many years when nobody gets paid for anything? We would like to explain and also ask for your help.

We call all our volunteers „Angels“. They normally carry a badge, and they are the backbone of everything. They are cleaning, filling the stomachs, providing high quality videos, and answering your questions all day long.

Last year more than 2.500 Angels helped to run the Congress with 12.500 visitors. The number of participants who register as Angels has grown over the years. And we would like to keep it that way. We don’t know yet, due to still shifting requirements, how many Angels we will need. But be sure to register if you want to find out.

This year’s Congress will take place in a new location in Leipzig and will have even more visitors. This means: We cannot know yet all possible new tasks that a new building and location will generate. But at the same time, we want to keep our way in organizing the event which is run entirely by volunteers. This can only work, if you consider being an active part in it.

Being an Angel does not only mean work, it is also an unique way to get to know the inner workings of the Congress, to meet hilarious and interesting like-minded people and to feel really as a part of the crowd. And you will go to „Heaven“ as we call the epicenter of coordination for all Angels. Heaven will always find a task and a co-angel to work with for you.

Really, #tuwat!

Picture: kambor-wiesenberg, CC BY 2.0.

Assemblies – it’s about time!

Sat, 04 Nov 2017 05:02:23 +0000

tl;dr register your assembly asap

We’ll have a huge chunk of an exhibition hall for the Assemblies with nearly three times the space as there was in Hamburg. To transform a faceless and boring exhibition hall into a cosy, hacky, welcoming and inspirational place, we need you!

Over the last years the concept of Assemblies was constantly evolving and changing. With our move to Leipzig, there are new challenges and opportunities. In this huge space, Assemblies, people and groups will gather around different subjects, interests and competences. These will be represented by “Chaos Competence Centers.”

A Chaos Competence Center is a structure very much like a village at Chaos Communication Camps: The usual Chaos where Assemblies blend into each other and everyone cares.

Chaos Competence Centers can provide stages, workshop spaces, shared areas and cosy places to talk, discuss or chill, and much more – only your imagination is the limit! For a start, some bigger groups went ahead to form Chaos Competence Centers. They evolve around a subject, but are by no means limited to it:
“The Hive” will gather machines that fabricate anything out of digital bits and real materials; “Chaos West” will gather all objects that move over the floor, they even have a huge test track for your motorized couch; Freifunk will be bigger than ever – expect many more Chaos Competence Centers!

If your assembly covers similar topics and interests as one of the existing Chaos Competence Centers, please attach and join! Also, please feel free to create your own Chaos Competence Center and let gravity do its work to catch more assemblies, we’re curious!

Besides these Chaos Competence Centers, there will be a lot of space for your very own ideas and projects; have fun and let others participate in what you’re doing!

Certainly we’ll provide some tables and chairs “as usual” for all Assemblies who don’t want or can’t build big infrastructures and focus more on meet-up and work together on projects.

Due to the fact that this year all the assemblies will be sharing one big hall, there will be some challenges: light and noise. So if you plan to bring very bright or very noisy stuff, please keep in mind that there will be a couple of thousand people in the same room with you!

Leave the floodlights and Disco PAs at home, think about low ambient light design or table-spot-lights for hardware-hacking and be creative about noise pollution – you might also try concepts such as “silent disco”, DECT, rad1o or FM transmitted talks/workshops. Be prepared not to run your loud machines while your neighbors wanna run a workshop or host a talk. Dampening noise and blocking light pollution can also be accomplished by creating walls – from fabric or other materials; be creative! Transforming this huge hall into a maze of cozy corners is our quest for this year’s congress!

**We can’t wait to see the huge space busy and full – also we’re curious to see your living room, workshop and hackspace on this empty field.

So now it’s up to you: Register your Assembly now, tell us what you want to bring, build and do!

Call for Papers: CryptoCon16 – Patch Me If You Can

Wed, 09 Mar 2016 20:52:05 +0000

For the the fourth time Leipzig Hackerspace sublab e.V. and Bündnis Privacy Leipzig e.V. invite everybody to our security conference CryptoCon16 themed “Patch me if you can”. Ehe event will take place from May 19 until May 22, 2016, at our location in Leipzig-Plagwitz (Westwerk).
For four days, we will focus on:

cryptography
practical approaches to encryption
decentralized communication infrastructure
law and administrative questions
privacy
open hardware
hacktivism
attacks on IT and communication systems
security solutions and protocols

In 2013 Edward Snowdens uncoverings made our worst nightmares come true. Federal and Intelligence surveillance these days even outperforms our most pessimistic predictions.
Private companies housing tremendous amounts of data, of collected with users conscent. Legal limbo often makes them becoming sheriffs deputy, when request by government agency come in.
We were promised, that all this was about to change, one will get to the bottom of it. But as of now: Nothing happened. Nothing changed.
Even worse, instead of making the intelligence agencies subject to massive reforms, build up an effective federal control, restrict cooperations with agencies from overseas, restrict private data aggregation, federal surveillance will even be expanded.
Mindestspeicherfrist (data retention, from 2017) in Germany, permanent state of emergency in France, will be only the first steps towards an all European Police State.

We invite all people to become a part of CryptoCon16. Get involved, may it be by submitting a creative or critical project, clarifying or explaining a specific issue, report about something, or basically almost everything you can imagine. We would like to motivate you, to submit installations, lectures, workshops, presentations or ideas for panels and discussions as well as art installations and performances. Please submit your project until March 31, 2016 23:59 CET. A short description of your project along with the approximate time duration to cryptocon at sublab dot org or submit it directly to our conference tool1.

To get an impression of CryptoCon we recommend the recordings of our previous events[2][3]4.

1 Submit your project
2 CryptoCon15
3 CryptoCon 14
4 CryptoCon 13