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 …

This year the Haecksen found a new home base at the congress. Their gathering place is in the Haecksen Area at the back of A08. As usual there will be a sofa, some tee and nice lights making the Haecksen Area one of the cosier places at the congress.

So if you are interested in meeting other women who are in this in computer stuff like you are there is the place to be. And don’t be shy if you are owner of a y-chromosome, you are welcome too, of course.

But the Haecksen Area is more than a nice hangout for the female …

For many people cryptography is something that they consider too complicated. While most current implementations demand a strong knowledge of the mathematical background, the basic principles are quite easy to catch. In order to understand these principles Brenno de Winter will go back in time in his lecture Learning cryptography through handcyphers – Shaping a digital future with ancient wisdom to take a look at the evolution of modern cryptography.

He will focus on handcyphers that can be used without a computer and have grown in complexity throughout time even tough some early mechanisms …

Good ideas deserve to be stolen. Lightning talks are such a fantastic idea that we just had to nick it. We were inspired to have our own lightning talks at 21C3 (last year) by the Perl community who may not have invented the concept but definitely introduced it to a larger audience at their YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference).

But what is a lightning talk? It’s a 5-minute talk you (for reasons of your own) don’t feel like doing as a full 1-hour presentation. Maybe the topic is too obscure. Maybe the research you want to present is still too much in progress. Maybe you just want to talk about a …

Honeypots are a well known and deployed technique to gather information about new and unknown attack vectors. While there are many different types of honeypots used on server side to detect threats or spamming activities for example, there isn’t very much out there to deal with client harassment. Microsoft has recently started a new research initiative to actively detect those client-side threats on a larger scale by having a computer or a virtual PC that actively mimics the actions of a user surfing the web.

In their lecture Honeymonkeys – Chasing hackers with a bunch of monkeys Krisztian …

Last year the workshop room was just a smaller lecture hall where not workshops but lectures took place. This year we would like to see real hands-on-workshops hold by you instead. There will be a table under the windows in the roof of room A08 at the end of the Hackcenter. At this table fit about 23 people and there will be no digital projector or other kind of presentation device. So, can you think of its use? Right! It’s the workshop area!
As the congress is a quite dynamic environment we just set up a page in the congress-wiki where you can reserve some time at this table to do any …

We have opened the 22C3 Public Wiki. It’s late, but it’s here. We are still filling it. Please use it and contribute. If you miss something or have any other general question that you think should be covered by the wiki, place your question in the FAQ.

Note that you can access the Wiki via http and https. We recommend using https for security reasons. You might want to install our CCCV-CA certificate to get around the browser warnings regarding unknown certificates. Mac OS X users can install this systemwide, other platforms might use the certificate in the browser.

Have you ever written an ode to your favorite Window Manager or a haiku about biometric passports? If so, share your works with us! If not, it’s time to get started, since the dead line of the 22c3 lyrics contest Lyrical I is upcoming! All contributions should reach lyrical_iATccc.de by December, 4th.
What are we looking forward to?

• lovely poetry
• fun
• new and unconventional approaches to topics
• original signatures and fortune cookies for all :-)

The best contributions (in German or English) will be awarded prizes sponsored by foebud and read aloud during the awarding ceremony at the …

Information on vulnerabilities and information security threads is very valuable. And, in fact, there is a big market, but it’s neither structured nor liquid. Seriously thinking about this fact leads to a couple of questions: Would we live in a more secure world if every geek could go and sell his exploit at the market price? How could this market eventually be organised? What are the incentives of market participants and where are dangers for conflicts of interest?

Rainer Böhme holds a degree in communication science, economics and computer science. He is researcher in the privacy and …

It seems like this blog on the preparations for 22C3 already filled a gap: Several blogs commented on our efforts, most of them in German. This brings us to the question why we write this blog in English (or rather: broken English) while the majority of all participants at the Congress will be German or from German-speaking countries.

Almost from the beginning in the 1980s, the Chaos Communication Congress used the sub-title “The European Hacker Party”. What this meant in reality was that among all the German hackers you’d find the occasional guy or girl from Austria, Switzerland or the …