The congress fahrplan is nearing completion, and we’re starting to plan the details. One important part of this is finding Heralds: volunteers who for a couple of hours are willing to be the main spokesperson in a conference room, who announce the individual sessions, and help out when something goes wrong.

Photo by smallcaps.

This year we would like to have a Herald for every single talk, not just the big ones in Saal 1. That’s quite an ambitious goal (our Herald schedule is comprised of 44 shifts), …

If you have a DVB-T receiver for your computer don’t forget to bring it to 23C3 as we are about to broadcast locally all for lecture rooms via DVB-T this time. This is an experiment and is considered to be an additional way of broadcasting the lectures (we try to provide public TVs and IP Streaming).

We still have problems getting enough TV Sets for 23C3. If you have the option to borrow some sets or know of a source where we could lend 10 to 15 sets, [please let us know][3].

[3]: mailto:23c3-orga at cccv.de

antenna has been working at the 23C3 design for months now and we are happy to present you some results of her work.

Please use the banners to link to this weblog or the official 23C3 website so other people get to know the congress. And the wallpapers are a constant reminder to you that soon there will be the 23C3. We hope you look forward to it as excited as we we do.

Professional members of the fourth estate who wish to cover the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress will have to apply for accreditation in advance, as every year. How can you get this accreditation?

If you would like to apply to our press list, please submit your name, your contact information, the name of your affiliated news source, and a scan of your media identification or press pass to 23c3-press at cccv.de. Additionally, we would like to know which topics you plan to cover. If you are a freelancer or a member of public interest groups, send us a short list of your recent articles.

Join us …

We just published Fahrplan version 0.3. There are some minor changes due to special wishes of speakers. But the main difference are the workshops which are now visible in the Fahrplan. Have a look.

Nobody likes bans and regulations. Some people smoke at the Congress, some don’t. Almost all people hate the smell of cold smoke everywhere after four days at the Congress. So here we are again, asking you to understand and trying to make things acceptable for dislikers of bans and regulations, like ourselves. Here’s what we wrote last year:

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 …

Blog TV in Japan shows an Interview with German mobile entrepreneur Jan Michael Hess. After some minutes of talking about mobile economy, they mention an event that captures the interest of the Japanese hosts: A hacker conference in Europe. They even learn something important: “Hackers are good people”. Watch it yourself (the interview is partly in English):

Blog TV has a page (in Japanese) that offers additional information. A nice piece that shows people are actually interested in the stuff we do in corners of the world where you wouldn’t expect it. Domo arigato!

Of course, the title of this blog posting is wrong.

This is the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress. For some of you, this number might ring a bell, in a Pavlovian sense that is. Apart from the fact that a 1998 film telling a story somehow connected to the CCC and the Cold War era hacker scene had the very title 23, this number is also related to Discordianism, a modern, chaos-based religion founded in either 1958 or 1959. It has been described as both an elaborate joke disguised as a religion, and as a religion disguised as an elaborate joke. Some of its followers make the claim that it is “a …

We all need to have people after whom we can model our lives. We are not sure everybody knows Rop Gonggrijp but if you don’t you should. He is the one who will take a look at some cold, hard facts on voting computers on day 1 at 8:30 PM.

Amsterdam just dismissed electronic voting computers for the elections. Rop will talk about his fight against this computers and for (not only) Dutch voters to verify their votes. You will learn why there are many reasons to not placing the whole system of hand counts in jeopardy: simplicity, transparency, and plenty of witnesses who can understand the voting …

As we told you at the Congress Website:

We encourage you to come up with good ideas, interesting projects and general feedback at any time.

But to do interesting projects you need space and time to discuss, to present some ideas and to work in a smaller group of people on a hands-on basis. The place to do that is the workshop room, where some tables and 23 chairs, a video projector and up to two hours time give you the opportunity to be part of the congress program.

There already are some very cool workshops:

• Fabienne will build a Wifi Backpack/Messenger Bag Strap with you. Please register! …

The Fahrplan is out. Have a look.

The conference will present about 120 lectures ranging from an report about the RFID Hacking efforts of the CCC in the last year, to a discussion of State Authorities Access to Sensible Information, to an overview about Culture Jamming & Discordianism. Voting Computer will be a topic too, of course.

If you miss something in the schedule or just want to tell something, you have still the opportunity to do so. Present and discuss your own topics in the Workshop Room or give a Lightning Talk. Just reserve some time in the Wiki.

Wir brauchen auch dieses Jahr wieder zahlreiche Engel. Wenn Du Lust hast, Engel zu werden, dann lies Dir die Seite über Chaos-Engel im Wiki durch und melde Dich im Engelsystem an.