And the Erisian Dwarfs have already started to set up life support.

The cool people of Zone-H that will give a lecture named “Corp vs. Corp” have a second identity named Hero-Z that produces cool comics and now they have released their forth episode dedicated to 22C3.

The title matches the 22C3 motto: “Private Investigations“. You can download the full comic as one huge PDF file.

The comic series’ super-heroine Evil Angelica also did a darkish, electronic “theme song” for the comic. Get this in MP3.

They will distribute a limited set of CDs with the PDF and theme …

This time, there will be a small hardware shop on location at 22C3 (in front of lecture room 2). If you need things like DVDs, CDs, hard disks and such they might be able to help. At Alexanderplatz you also find the “Saturn” electronic supermarket that might provide less specialized stuff (phones, cables, whatever).

Brenno de Winter is an IT journalist and activist from the Netherlands. Moreover, he is a brillant speaker whose lectures are both entertaining and informative. So don’t miss his lecture on Cryptography which has already been mentioned on this blog.
Perhaps even more important will be his contribution on the topic of data retention, which has unfortunately become a top issue in current European politics. Where most activists just lament over the mayhem of civil rights and liberties, Brenno’s lecture on Hacking Data Retention – How bureaucrats fail to fight terror shows the hacker approach to …

Not far away from the bcc, just about one kilometre down the road, you can find the indoor swimming pool Schwimmhalle Fischerinsel. There you have the chance to swim, take a shower or relax in the sauna. Reason enough to take your swimming trunks or swimsuit with you!

entry fees:

• 8:00h-20:00h: 4, € or 2,50 € with discount
• before 8:00h or after 20:00h: 2,50 € for everybody

opening times during 22C3:

• 27.12.: 06:30 – 14:00
• 28.12.: 10:00 – 22:00
• 29.12.: 06:30 – 22:00
• 30.12.: 06:30 – 22:00

How to get there: Go out of the bcc and turn left at the big street. Just walk down the street, having the …

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).

Wikipedia, die freie Enzyklopädie in mehr als 100 Sprachen, ist auch dieses Mal wieder auf dem Congress vertreten. Henriette Fiebig, Autorin von “Wikipedia — Das Buch” unternimmt in ihrem Vortrag “Hexenbesen und heiliger Gral — Vorläufige und subjektive Gedanken zur inhaltlichen Qualität von Wikipedia-Artikeln” einen Parforceritt durch die Qualitätskontrollprozesse des …

Starting in the middle of the year a few concerns popped up in the mainstream press about security of RIM’s Blackberry toys. You know the little “Managers’ favourite Tamagotchi” feeding all your e-mails through RIM’s own hub… The professional paranoids were not very surprised by that.

First there was the investigative magazine “Computerwoche” telling that at car manufacturer Audi concerns remained to rethink if it’s a good idea to transfer confidential data via the RIM network.

A bit later on another magazine known for detailed and precise reports called Wirtschaftswoche leaked it’s own …

“Capture The Flag is a hacker contest. Teams of hackers battle against each other in a fight of supremacy in a network full of vulnerable services. The teams’ task is to defend a server while simultaneously attacking the other teams’ servers. At the beginning, all teams have the same services running. A central game server checks the services regularly by sending tickets, the so-called flags, which are collected later on. Every flag that is still there is awarded with scores. Whenever a team manages to read a flag on another system then their own, they can submit it at the game-server, thus …

The registration period for the hackcenter is over, and all seats are already distributed. Every project but the *BSD-projects should have just received the confirmation mail – if no mail arrives until Saturday, 17th, please mail to 22c3-hackcenter (at) cccv.de. Our apologies to all those who were not accepted, we had to reject several projects we personally really liked, but we don’t have enough space for all cool projects out there. Sorry.

The BSD-Projects (NetBSD, OpenBSD, OpenSSH, 9fans, MirOS and Darwin) will get their mails until Monday, we have some specific issues there.

Things are extremely busy with the 22C3 crew. Here’s what keeps us spinning at the moment:

• Two more speakers need to hand in details
• A few dates and times for talks have to be pushed around and re-arranged on request of some speakers
• Once these things are finalized, we have to release the stable version of the schedule which will hopefully not change until the end of the conference
• There are pressing deadlines for printed stuff: the proceedings of the conference (containing all the papers speakers handed in) and the all new and shiny “Congress Guide” for first-timers.

But don’t panic. …