SIGINT on CCC Event Blog

SIGINT 2013: Call for Participation

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 22:24:52 +0000

July 5th-7th, KOMED im Mediapark, Cologne, Germany

SIGINT is an annual hacker conference organized by the Chaos Computer Club. It features talks covering both technical and social aspects of our digital society.

VOLUNTEERS For SIGINT to be as great as always, we need your help. First and foremost, we need eager volunteers to help on-site with the intricate details of organizing a conference for hundreds of people. Please register as a volunteer as soon as we have the registration online.

ARTS AND PROJECTS Asides from helping us having everything run smoothly, we’d gladly accept any kind of project that can be built upon our conference infrastructure. Do you have a cool project you want to show off? Great! You’re just dying to have a venue to try out your fancy new art installation? Cool! Drop us a line at sigint-content(at)koeln.ccc.de and we’ll see if we can sort it out.

TALKS As a community-organized conference, we want to offer you the best lectures you can get. For this, we need your talk submissions—we’re offering one-hour slots (including Q&A), and your talk will be recorded and put online after the conference. Unless you opt out, of course.

If you think you have a great talk that other hackers should listen to, great! Just submit it at our talk submission site!

In case you’re undecided on whether your talk is appropriate, here’s a list of things we are interested in:
Anything that is related to these topics or close enough is welcome too!

Signals intelligence and surveillance techniques, e.g. digital wiretapping, deep packet inspection, etc.
Mobile device hacking and telecommunications security and exploiting weaknesses in mobile app ecosystems
Network neutrality, i.e. the ownership, censorship, circumvention and the politics of de facto standards
Programming languages, the state of the art and research as well as interesting new or old applications
Privacy in the age of big data, ensuring it via policy or technical means, ethical considerations, etc.
(Post-)Privacy, conflict between the desires of an individual and the public regarding social networks and public spaces
Alternative worlds, communities in the deep web, augmented reality, hackerspaces and other environments
Storming the clouds, hacking, breaking, exploiting and securing cloud-based computing and storage ideas
Transparency and participation in politics and governance, surveillance, open data and its applications
Physical hacking, making and fabbing, lockpicking, electronics and hardware design, artistic expression
Painting it green, concepts for reducing the ecological footprint our urban lifestyle has on the planet
Automation, labor market, terms of employment and future chances

As mentioned before, the above list is meant as an inspiration, and not a restriction. It is neither exhaustive nor complete.
All talk submissions will be reviewed and a benevolent selection of talks will try to represent the broadest possible spectrum to the best of our abilities.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Please try to submit a meaningful and complete description that tells us about your presentation. Keep in mind that the description is usually all the content committee has to judge your submission by—it should be appropriately informative. Quality, not size does matter. Please refrain from submitting company or product propaganda. We don’t care if your talk has already been held at another conference, but please make sure your content is up-to-date. The lecture part of your talk should try not to exceed 45 minutes – we still need some time for audience Q&A as well as speaker handover after your talk.
English is the preferred language (bear in mind you will have a global audience due to recording), but especially local topics can be held in German if you are more comfortable that way.

SUBMISSION OF TALKS AND WORKSHOPS
All talks, lecture and workshop proposals must be submitted online using our lecture submission system.
Please follow the instructions given there. If you have any questions regarding your submission, feel free to contact us at sigint-content(at)koeln.ccc.de.
If you want to do things which don’t require a lecture or workshop room, for example an art installation or some other kind of project, please contact us directly at sigint-content(at)koeln.ccc.de. We can help you find out if it is possible to do that on SIGINT.

As a reminder: SIGINT is a non-profit oriented event and neither speakers nor organizers get paid. However, financial help on travel expenses and accommodation is a possibility, should it be really needed. Don’t be shy and state your requirements in the application when submitting your lecture. We’ll contact you after your talk is accepted to see if we can work something out.

PUBLICATION
Audio and video recordings of the lectures will be published online in various formats. All material will be available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Germany License. Note that this license allows for the commercial use of the content to allow media organisations to use snippets from lecture recordings for their reporting. If you wish to alternatively use a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Germany License or if you require that your lecture is not recorded or streamed at all, please state this with your submission. If you don’t tell us otherwise, audio and video of your lecture will be under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Germany License.

DATES & DEADLINES That’s our schedule:

May 5th, 2013 (23:59 UTC): Submission deadline
June 5th, 2013: Final notification of acceptance
July 5th-7th, 2013: SIGINT13

CONTACT
If there’s any further questions, don’t hesitate to drop us a line at sigint-orga(at)koeln.ccc.de.

Next SIGINT in 2012

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 22:37:37 +0000

After its debut in May 2009 and successful sequel in May 2010 SIGINT in Cologne became a regular CCC event. We will keep this tradition in 2012.

We’ll be taking a break in 2011 to support the Chaos Communication Camp. This event takes place every four years, with 2011 seeing its next iteration in Finowfurt near Berlin from August 10th through August 14th.

A downsized version of SIGINT would, in our opinion, reduce the possible scope of subjects we could cover, as well as affecting the depth of detail. Conference planning will start Summer 2011 and will be announced in the usual place.

We anticipate hosting next SIGINT in 2012 – unabridged and undiluted – in Cologne, Germany.

SIGINT10 recordings available

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 20:56:23 +0000

Some of you might have already noticed that the biggest part of this year’s SIGINT recordings were published on ftp.ccc.de. These videos are also available for online viewing in your web browser in our media archive.

The last bunch of videos will be available after manual cutting and reencoding. Unfortunately this needs some time. But it will not be forgotten. This is the list of those 28 missing files to complete the 68 recordings in total:

“cognitive_cities”
“the_medium_is_the_messiah”
“computer.spiele.politik”
“buying_privacy_in_digitized_cities”
“future_3.0”
“heart_of_gold”
“die_gescheiterte_revolution”
“die_kirche_im_staat_lassen”
“the_road_to_hell_is_paved_with_best_practices”
“volkszaehler”
“der_bug”
“hoist_the_colours”
“keykeriki_v2”
“peer_to_peer_communism”
“datenbrief”
“reach_out_and_touch_face”
“das_leben_der_anderen”
“indect”
“misstraue_autoritäten”
“auf_schritt_und_tritt”
“interaktive_demokratie”
“identitaets-kriege”
“digitaler_steuerbuerger”
“die_verfassungsbeschwerde_in_sachen_elena”
“deutschlandradio_-_breitband”
“(dis-)connected_worlds”
“eine_zensur_findet_statt”
“schoene_neue_kreative_welt”

The videos are in an Matroska format with the video encoded in x264 720p and audio in Ogg Vorbis. Feel free to reencode these videos in your favorite format for watching on your handheld and mobile devices.

Comments and recommendations are appreciated.

Hardhack / SIGINT 2010: We are looking for your hardware hacking workshops!

Mon, 10 May 2010 22:19:48 +0000

SIGINT 2010 also hosts Hardhack, the open hardware hacking workshop event. There are still slots available in the workshop programme, so apply for one now!

Here’s how to do it, in the form of a very special message from the organizers of the Hardhack sub-conference:

_
hardhack will be all hands-on workshops and/or demos. what does that mean? that means that there will be no powerpoint presentations, no blah blah, only hands-on workshops or demonstrations. there will be no video projectors, so if you require that for your workshop, please rethink and prepare printed or digital handouts to convey the information you need to share.

example topics for hands-on workshops or demos at hardhack (these are not limiting, be creative!): building hardware from a kit you designed, reverse engineering existing hardware, wearables, washable circuitry, building sensors from scratch, 3d printing, diy manufacturing, reversing firmware on existing hardware, open source hardware, fun with embedded device firmware, blinky stuff, robotics, audio hardware, vehicle modding, circuit design, or anything fun your brain can output for a hardhack workshop.

submit your workshop/demo to mail att hardhack dott org with the following info:

workshop/demo title

workshop/demo description

workshop/demo time requirement (please estimate as well as you can)

your contact info: email, website, cellphone number

approximate parts cost for participants (kits or other materials you will provide)

required and suggested materials for participants to bring (examples: laptop, usb/serial adaptor, hackable stuff)

any questions you may have

once workshops are accepted, there will be a sign up list for each workshop to determine which ones make the cut. this reduces the empty / too-full workshop syndrome and allow for a maximum of hardware hacking! hardhack will be a sub-conference of SIGINT this year, and all entry costs for participants will apply. travel costs for persons giving workshops at hardhack can not be covered, but the entry cost to SIGINT will be covered. the call for workshops for hardhack is separate from the call for papers for SIGINT, you are free to apply to both if you like. selling kits for your workshop is fine, but please keep the costs fair and transparent from the beginning. hardhack will have the space for about 200 participants, sign ups for workshop participation will go online as soon as each workshop is approved.

any questions? mail att hardhack dott org.

SIGINT 2009 audio and video recordings available

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 17:38:34 +0000

“For every month of preparation time that you did not have before recording an event add three months of work afterwards”. That might be a rule of thumb. Well, we had five days after spontaneously deciding to stand in and record SIGINT 2009. Due to the short preparation and setup time audio distortions occurred. If it would only have been for the notorious 50Hz/60Hz hum. Fortunately we were able to restore anything. Unfortunately this had to be done by hand.

But now the recordings have finally materialized! While most of the lectures were held in German there is also some english material available. The encoded SIGINT Video and Audio Recordings can be directly retrieved from ftp.ccc.de. Most people might prefer streaming video via media.ccc.de. We recorded in 720×576 DV, Stereo. The encoding was done in H.264 with AAC in an MP4 container.

For most of us recording and video-editing were a first-timer; an exception were the encoding people. While it was a hassle most of the time it was a chance to play with interesting hardware and learn something. Thanks to anyone who helped!

The recordings are licensed under a Creative-Commons-Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Germany license. Please consider spreading and mirroring.

In the next few weeks a SIGINT-Doku will likely be made available.

Update: Torrent of all available audio materials