Schedule on CCC Event Blog

From halfnarp to schedule

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 17:00:00 +0000

Many thanks to everyone who filled out the halfnarp. Thanks to you and the many helping hands of the speaker desk and content teams, we can present the first version of the 38C3 schedule today!

The official program of the 38th Chaos Communication Congress comes up with 7 tracks containing 140 talks with 6625 minutes of program. There is definitely something for everyone! The 38C3 starts on December 27 at 10:30 with the Opening Ceremony and ends on December 30 at 18:00 with “Return to legal constructions”.

For those of you who have been counting by hand or even found the gaps in the program: that’s right, because we have some surprise talks that we will announce to you shortly before 38C3. The timetable is version Alpha-0.1. Traditionally, there are still minor changes before and during the Congress. It’s always worth taking a look at what the content team has put together for you.

Meet the 36C3 track team “Resilience and Sustainability”

Tue, 03 Dec 2019 23:23:36 +0000

We’re 36C3’s Resilience and Sustainability content team and want to show you just our bit of work that helped making this year’s Fahrplan as amazing as it has turned out.

Our team consists of hackers and scientists, tinkerers and PhDs and was formed for 34C3 when we felt that the conference was developing a blind spot between complete destruction of all the IT things and the fascinations for the resulting apocalypse. We wanted to give a stage to new and shiny useful technology for a better and more resilient world – with actual prototypes!

This year’s motto “resource exhaustion” added a perspective on sustainability to the track – even though the term is rather overloaded. There’s a plethora of conferences selling you on the most recent hypes about how machine learning, crypto currencies and the cloud will save the world, but we think that it is in the spirit of this community to question everything, think and focus on technology that will last for much longer – both physically and from a software engineering point of view. We found it fitting to see how the existing resources can be used and reused, who’s building resilient technologies that can help people in emergencies, oppressive regimes or off-grid situations, and – in a broader scope – how can we build the systems of the future not riddled by the problems of our generation.

Along the way, we hope we can make software developers think about the impact of their busy-looping JS, bad communication patterns and faulty software architecture – all of which are significantly contributing to climate change.

The concept of resilience itself – especially combined with sustainability – is rather interdisciplinary, part hacking and making, part science and politics. This puts us in competition with other track teams trying to catch the most interesting lectures for a given subject, but also allowed us to trade slots with those teams as well, once we were running out of our allotted time budget. ;)

Next year, we hope to collect the “haveyoursay” feedback much earlier so we can incorporate your feedback and follow your suggestions for valuable speakers and topics.

While we were quite pleased with the submissions we found once CfP kicked off, our curation process started way earlier: Reflecting on feedback we received after 35C3, we came together in IRC and RL, brainstormed about interesting projects we heard about in the past year, thought about relevant topics and identified speakers worth having.

Even then, the speakers we “invited” still had to go through our rigorous curation process. After all, our team received a total of 74 lecture submissions and had to narrow them down into only 15 hours (in 18 lectures) of 36C3 programme. We vetted each submitter, trying to make sense of their submission, read their papers, ask and answer questions and spend the remaining time meeting and coordinating with all the other track teams, before finally writing this blog post! If we add up all the time spent preparing our 18 lecture foot steps in the Fahrplan, we’re looking at one or two weeks full time work for each of us.

In the end we’re quite proud of the topics we could cover this year. Of course, we’re still not short of topics to cover next year :-) It’s time for more critical reflection of wastefulness within the computer nerd scene and how we can minimise the environmental impact of our C3s and Camps in the years to come.

36C3 content teams running full steam

Tue, 29 Oct 2019 16:58:41 +0000

Last Sunday at midnight the submission period for our Call for Participation ended. The last submission, by a Swiss, landed just in time at 23:59:20 UTC. Our content curation teams will now use the next two weeks to review, rate, sort, and ultimately decide on a large number of submissions. We intend to inform all submitters on November 11th on whether we found a place for them in our Fahrplan.

At the time of our coordination meeting on Sunday there were 690 pending submissions in our system. To put this into perspective: If you would want to just spend a minute to review them all, you would be busy for eleven and a half hours. Another way to look at the numbers is that nearly five percent of 36C3 participants have applied to present a lecture!

Among these submissions the most popular tracks are “Ethics, Society & Politics” with 237, the “Security” track having 194 and the “Science” track seeing 82 submissions.

The following table contrasts the numbers of submissions this year with the numbers of lectures accepted for 35C3. This means that (assuming a similar amount of lectures this year), some teams have to reject 82 percent of their submissions, sometimes heartbreakingly so. The sheer range and creativity of the submissions left us deeply impressed with the energy and wisdom that is sparkling within our community. All without us offering a single cent of speaking fees.

Track	Submissions	Slots
Art & Culture	49	18
Ethics, Society & Politics	237	42
Hardware & Making	49	16
Resilience & Sustainability	61	16
Science	82	21
Security	194	39

To complicate things further: You gave us valuable feedback on our haveyoursay interface, which helped us identify important issues not yet covered by submissions. Of the over 2,000 comments you sent us, around a third was constructive and helpful, with some of them pointing to things other than the conference program where 36C3 could improve. So in addition of the submissions already in frab, some of this year’s content will be filled by invitations by our content curators.

What this all means: Each lecture that makes it into this year’s Fahrplan has prevailed against tough competition and each presenter we could not accept to the conference can be sure that they belong to a group of high quality submissions that had to be turned down solely due to time constraints. We simply do not have more than four days and five stages. With all high quality rejections alone we easily could fill two more conferences. And while our teams often try to explain their decisions together with their rejections, the overwhelming number of submissions makes answering each and everyone of them a time consuming effort. Also, as stated above, the most common reason not to accept a lecture is the simple lack of space in our Fahrplan. So if you receive a rejection email with that reason, please don’t take it as a cheap excuse.

But who are those in charge of selecting 36C3 content? At the moment, lectures are curated by six teams with three to ten main curators and an extended set of reviewers – all in all around sixty people now eagerly working through all those submissions. Some of them have introduced themselves in this blog in the past.

Some team members have introduced themselves on their social media accounts and actively work on encouraging potential speakers to submit (just monitor #36c3 to find out who they are), while others prefer to just help anonymously. And a lot of work is needed: Starting even during CfP submission periods, around 250 lectures needed to be fixed up, their durations, event type or tracks corrected, questions answered by email, co-speakers manually added, and typos corrected. With those bureaucratic nuisances out of the way, all submission now have the best chance to shine by their merits.

Over the next two weeks, our curators will now have to dive into the actual details: analyse the substance, verify claims made in the submissions, clustering them by rough topics, researching presenters regarding their expertise and ability to present – and to verify they do not accidentally invite PR drones, intelligence service, or military personnel on stage. So if you see storms of visitors on your social (business) media accounts, just smile and wave at our curation teams. ;)

Our teams are made up of experts in their respective fields, sometimes working in their domains for decades, who can tap into their vast networks to help estimate a submitter’s history. We want the speakers to present their own work, we want them to present for their enthusiasm for the topic, not money. We want them to be role models, not rock stars. So it is important that our teams find out who the speakers have been working for in the past, where they have presented and how that turned out, and if the conduct in their communities might raise objections to having them on our stages.

In the end we need to find a balance between novelty and community traditions, presentation skills and domain knowledge, entertainment value and soundness, allowing newcomers and tapping into weathered experts, presenting utopists and realists, as well as topics with global impact and niche expertise we think will be important soon.

With so many knobs to turn, we know it’s impossible not to be disappointed with the outcome of certain promising choices, and in the end each 36C3 participant brings a slightly different set of interests, so it might very well be that you find parts of the Fahrplan uninteresting and some lectures worth being replaced with others that you might find more interesting. But keep in mind, there are 16,000 other attendees who might disagree.

One last thing: While the content teams curating the main stages have the longest traditions, they’re by far not the only teams working on content presented at 36C3: As usual there will be self-organised lightning talks, which you can submit at https://c3lt.de/ once its 36C3 section is live. Also there are at least three decentralised stages at 36C3 assemblies that await your submission now: Chaos West will be running a stage at their asssembly, you can submit to here https://fahrplan.chaos-west.de/36c3/cfp, the Freifunk community has kicked off their CfP here https://talks.oio.social/36c3-oio/cfp and, last but not least, ChaosZone just opened theirs as well https://cfp.chaoszone.cz/36c3/cfp.

Oh, and one more thing: If the stars align just right, this year there might be a Hacker Jeopardy again!

Image by Florian Kleiner, CC BY-SA 2.0

Real soon now: Fahrplan-Release

Tue, 05 Dec 2017 23:57:42 +0000

fullnarp impression

The 34C3 Congress schedule (Fahrplan) needs proper planning and is an incredibly complex task. And it’s all about you: Offering over 500 submissions, sharing your knowledge and important political and technical insights for free. We’re using sophisticated tools, and a lot of manual work to end up with a well-planned schedule. You helped not just with providing your preferences on talks you want to see, but also by practical tool improvement: Our conference planning system frab just saw a donation of a 5000+ lines patch with a French translation.

Sharing your preferences in the halfnarp helped a lot to model a Fahrplan that reduces all kinds of conflicts as much as possible. You examined more than 160 confirmed lectures in six content tracks – all in all 130 hours of program. And over 4,000 votes were clicked via halfnarp this year. So, thank you very much!

To give you a little insight into what it means to create a good schedule, we would like to share some of the constraints and parameters that needed to be taken into consideration: Half- and one-hour-slots don’t easily add up to an even batch of lectures; we need at least fifteen minutes breaks between lectures. Some speakers have kids and can’t present in the night or are not available on all days. Others just don’t function properly in the hours before noon or late in the evening, due to personal time zones, jet lag or partying.

There are also some speakers that don’t feel comfortable in huge halls, even though they are in high demand. Some presenters are prone to overrun their time, some events need stage setup times. For our foreign audience we want to have not only German language lectures running in parallel. For catering to all content interests, we needed to spread out all our six content tracks as evenly as possible. And so on…

Icing on the cake: Some speakers with security background exploited a bug in frab to quietly upgrade their lecture to 1h15min after acceptance (but we got you!).

Inspecting some of the correlations revealed by your halfnarp-votes left us speechless, others happy: You seem to understand that bitcoin is bad for the environment, „Cryptocurrencies“ correlates highly with „Climate change! What do we know?“ after all. We’re a little concerned what the high correlation between „Influencing decisions with AI“ and „Hacking real estate markets“ means for the future – and would like to remind you of the hacker ethics.

Some of the new features that were useful for planning will flow back into the halfnarp calendar view: You will be able to use correlations to find related talks to the one you liked.

So, once the Fahrplan is released real soon now: Before complaining always remember that it has been your decisions, and everything else is the AI’s fault!

Bild: Tasmo, CC BY-SA 2.0.

MRMCD 2017: Schedule and end of presale

Fri, 11 Aug 2017 15:14:14 +0000

Finally, we can present you a preliminary schedule for this year’s MRMCD! We are happy to see the wide range and diversity of the topics covered in the submitted talks and workshops. You can find the schedule here: https://cfp.mrmcd.net/2017/schedule/.

Please be patient with us: Our schedule still is a young plant that needs to grow. Not all speakers have already confirmed their appearance yet and some talks will still shift their exact times.

If you did not do so already, you can buy one of the very last tickets in our ticket shop. We assume that the presale will be sold out very soon. There will be a handful of tickets for sale on site, but since the capacity of the building is limited we cannot promise you to get in without a ticket from the presale.

If you have any questions, you can reach us at parkaufsicht()mrmcd.net.

33C3 halfnarp: The talks that ‚work for us‘

Fri, 18 Nov 2016 16:56:07 +0000

The 33C3 content committee is proud to announce a lecture selection that ‚works for us‘. Our five hard-working 33C3 track teams have hand-picked a set of around 150 excellent lectures to be formed into the best four day, six track programme possible.

Having to select talks from an impressive lot of more than 500 submissions was a hard and sometimes frustrating task. But we have been amazed by the overwhelming interest in volunteering to present at 33C3. We’re thrilled to see that support and enthusiasm to contribute to this year’s event is as high as it ever been. Some speakers even refuse to accept a free ticket!

With this post, we want to do three things: Whet your appetite for our programme, ask for your help in putting together a collision-free schedule, and call for your workshops and self-organized sessions.

First, we present: The halfnarp https://halfnarp.events.ccc.de/.

In the halfnarp, you’ll find a list of all re-confirmed talks for each track (note: around 15 lectures are not yet re-confirmed, if you’re a speaker, please check your spam folder ;). You might notice that we offer a new track ‚Space‘, simply because we think all hackers should absolutely make space ‚work for them‘.

Second, we ask that you to help us put together a collision-free schedule that ‚works for you‘:

Select all lectures you would like to attend.
Press submit.
That’s it, there’s no step three. We’ll do the rest.

You can modify your choice at any time (don’t forget to press Submit again), or share it with your friends.

Third: The vast majority of submissions did not make it into the curated lecture programme. But that does not mean they wouldn’t be interesting to the crowd at 33C3. We invite you to present your ideas in lightning talks, gather in your assemblies or even get hands-on with a self organized session.

Foto: CC-BY 2.0, astro@spaceboyz.net.

Camp Schedule Published

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 11:30:39 +0000

Almost a week ago we published the Camp Fahrplan (schedule). Follow this link for more information.

Crypto Talk at 27C3: Automatic Identification of Cryptographic Primitives in Software, Day1, 16:00, Saal 3

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 01:31:51 +0000

Many applications, including closed source applications like malware or DRM-enabled multimedia players (you might consider them as malware too) use cryptography. When analyzing these applications, a first step is the identification and localization of the cryptographic building blocks (cryptographic primitives, for example AES, DES, RSA…) in the applications. When these blocks have been localized, the input and output of the cryptographic primitives and the key management can be observed and the application can be analyzed further. Fortunately, many cryptographic algorithms use special constants or have a typical fingerprint and there are only a few different public implementations of the algorithm. This allows us to automate this first, Felix Gröbert will show us how:

Using dynamic binary instrumentation, we record instructions of a program during runtime and create a fine-grained trace. We implement a trace analysis tool, which also provides methods to reconstruct high-level information from a trace, for example control flow graphs or loops, to detect cryptographic algorithms and their parameters.

Trace driven/dynamic analysis has some advantages of static analysis:

Because the program is analyzed at runtime, it is immediately known which parts of the code are used at which time, so that they might be correlated with runtime decryption of the code or with network communication.
Inputs and outputs of the primitives as well as the keys are recorded, even if the originate from a remote server or botnet. This allows us to immediately distinguish between long term keys and session keys, if multiple executions of the same program can be recorded.
This is also highly interesting if private keys are included in an obfuscated binary, for example private RSA keys.
Dead or unused code is automatically excluded, so that one can proceed with the main parts of the code first.
If additional code is loaded from a server, it is included in the analysis. This would be hard to impossible using static analysis.

Of course, trace driven analysis has it disadvantages, for example if a malware needs to communicate with a command-and-control server, which has already been taken down or behaves differently on different systems or at different times.__

Personally, I am interested in this talk because it might make ease up the analysis of closed source applications using cryptography. Even if the application, the DRM scheme, or the cryptographic primitive has no special weaknesses or bugs, just he recording of every input and output of all cryptographic building blocks in the application might be sufficient to extract a DRM free version of DRM protected digital content. Please also note that even if an application uses only well analyzed cryptographic primitives as AES and RSA, it might still be insecure, if these primitives are used in the wrong way.

See the talk at Day 1, 16:00, Saal 3!

Author: Erik Tews

24 Hour Hardware Hacking Returns to 27c3

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 19:54:29 +0000

Hackers of all ages can (learn how to) make things at the Hardware Hacking Area of the 27c3!

The HHA is open to everyone and open the entire congress! Hackers of all ages and skill levels are welcome! Round-the-clock hands on workshops will be led by lots of experienced teachers like Mitch Altman, Jimmie P. Rodgers, fbz, Wim Vandeputte and…you!

Learn to solder, then help teach others! Make cool things with electronics, design and print 3D models on the Makerbot, break RFID, or give your own workshop on the projects you’ve been hacking on this year. Last year there was a Cantenna workshop, a Mikrocopter workshop, and a GSM workshop among many others.

Lots of kits for you to make will be available including Brain Machines, TV-B-Gones, Trippy RGB Waves, Mignonette Games, LEDcubes, LOL shields, Atari Punk Consoles…and there’s always room for yours!

To accommodate all this hardware hacking goodness, the HHA will be twice the size it was during the 26c3, but still conveniently located near the Hackcenter.

Even if you don’t have a ticket to Congress, you can stop by the HHA with a Night Pass good from Midnight to 6 AM. Night passes are only €5 and will be sold shortly before midnight each day of the 27c3.

Lightning Talks at the 27c3

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 19:04:15 +0000

Want four minutes on stage at the 27c3? You can have it! Registration is now open for the Lightning Talk sessions at the 27c3.

Taking place at 12:45 in Saal 3 on Days 2, 3 and 4, these fast paced sessions are perfect for pitching new software or hardware projects, exploits, creative pranks or strange ideas you need to share with the world.

Lightning talks are also good for getting publicity for your workshop at the 27c3, or for recruiting people to join in on things like a high calorie flash mob.

In order to maximize the available time, registrations will be granted to presenters who submit their graphics (i.e. slides, background picture, contact info, etc.) in advance. Exceptions will be made very selectively on a case-by-case basis. Register soon, as we anticipate the available slots will go quickly. (Proposals started coming in a few minutes after we put up a draft of the wiki page!)

Read the Lightning Talks article on the 27c3 wiki for more information!

Photo Courtesy Matt Biddulph via flickr.

Workshops

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 12:02:26 +0000

During all the years there were really great workshops at the Chaos Communication Congress. Unfortunately they were a bit hard to find, because we only announced them in the wiki and some workshops weren’t in there either. So it is clear, that the lack of attendees in some workshops was surely not because of uninteresting topics but merely because of our laziness to make them easier to find.

Our approach to that problem is to ask all visitors who want to give a workshop at 27C3 to hand it in before the conference so we can release an official schedule for workshops before day 1 of the congress.

We should have enough time and rooms so there is hopefully no need for rejecting a workshop proposal unless you:

simply hand in a rejected talk as a workshop (a workshop is not meant to be a lecture)
simply want to sell a product (selling a kit for the workshop for a fair price is OK, of course)
forget to at least fill out the Title, Abstract and Description fields in the submission interface (so that visitors know what skills and what tools they need and whether you provide them, price of needed components, etc).

If your talk submission got accepted and the workshop depends on your talk, please drop a note so that we can schedule your workshop after your lecture.

Fellows who already handed in a workshop during the talk submission phase (and whose submission has the state “candidate” in Pentabarf) should find their submission also in the new submission interface. Ingenious, we know ;)

To submit a workshop for the conference please visit:
https://cccv.pentabarf.org/submission/27C3-Workshops.

If you have further questions that can’t wait ’til the end of December, you can comment here or include your question in the
Workshop-ALOAQ (At least once asked questions) page in the wiki.

Please note that there is also the possibility to do a workshop in the “Makers”-Room in the basement and/or at other tables in the BCC.

Sorry to say that, but even when doing a workshop, you still need a ticket to buy a normal ticket.

Content Meetings are over: Fahrplan released

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 22:46:04 +0000

This past Sunday, we concluded the second and final Content Meeting for 27C3. We’ve looked at all 223 submissions for talks and presentations and selected what we feel are the best 98 of them. We’d like to thank all submitters for the many interesting proposals that lightened up our work.

One card for each talk that was accepted for 27C3

But now, the schedule for the 27th Chaos Communication Congress is mostly done. So today we present the first release of the 27C3 presentation schedule (or “Fahrplan” in German): Fahrplan Version 0.1. Note this is Version 0.1. Blanks will be filled with more really cool stuff. Much more to come.

The Content Team is shuffling cards on the floor to plan 27C3

This year we’ll also have talks that last 30 minutes. The intent is to create a space for issues that are too complex for a Lightning Talk but still would not fill an entire hour. The resulting increase in the number of presentations serves to diversify the programme as well as allow people to tune into the event with morning sessions that don’t require quite the same attention span we might be able to more easily muster in afternoons and evenings.

Finished schedule for 27C3

We will be highlighting some of the accepted talks with short introductions here soon. So stay tuned. :-)