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. …

We recommend getting a place to sleep during the congress early. There are various possibilities. If you can afford it, getting a hotel room is probably the best, with a real bed and a real shower. If you are lucky enough to have friends in the capital you can bother between Christmas and New Year, getting a couch to crash on may also be neat. Now, what if you don’t happen to have these options? Then the gym is for you.

The gym is only two underground stations away from the congress venue. Staying there will cost you 5 € per night. You can buy tickets at the entrance of the bcc where you also …

Corinna Habets aka ‘pallas’ studies Computer Science at the RWTH Aachen. But her interests aren’t limited to programming language. She takes an interest in natural languages too. After starting to learn many different languages she is currently learning Esperanto with great success and enthusiasm and will speak about her experience with this nerdy language at the 22C3.
But that is not her only contribution to the program. Corinna also initiated the Lyrical I lyrics contest. As you can see, Corinna’s contributions significantly enlarge the diversity of this year’s program, which has never been …

“_Vote early, vote often_” is a quote variously attributed to three different Chicagoans: [Al Capone][1], the famous gangster; [Richard J. Daley][2], mayor from 1955 to 1976; and [William Hale Thompson][3], mayor from 1915-1923 and 1931-1935. All three were notorious for their corruption and their manipulation of the democratic process. It is most likely that Thompson invented the phrase, and Capone and Daley later …

Using Jabber, the open IM (and more) protocol? You can click your own schedule and get a reminder message for each lecture you chose 15 minutes before it starts using the all new 22C3 Lecture Reminder. Check it out.

Another entry in German…

Ihr solltet möglichst die aktuelle, einstündige Ausgabe von Chaosradio Express anhören. Warum? Weil sie ziemlich komplett großartig ist und Freude auf den Congress macht, darum. Am Mikro sitzen Tim und fukami und stellen ihre Highlights aus dem Congressprogramm vor. Podcast-Freunde mit iTunes können den Feed auch einfach abonnieren, um weitere Folgen nicht zu verpassen, alle anderen schauen einfach mal hier.

To a large extent, the 22C3 is a volunteer-driven event. We call the volunteers “Angels” and many odd jobs that need to be done at the congress rely on them. Angels don’t really get financial benefits, but they are rewarded for their enthusiastic and heroic actions with a free t-shirt and catering. If you want to join them, you’ll find everything you need to know in the Angel FAQ at our public wiki.

But wait, there’s more. This year, we want to have people helping out with one specific task. We have hundreds of talks at the conference. Last year, speakers just came unto the stage without an …

While Berlin gets into the top ten list of the world’s coolest cities hands down, sometimes the city officials surprise you with their unerring sense of bad taste. No, we’re not talking about the plan to turn the Alexanderplatz’s landmark TV tower into a pink football during the FIFA World Cup next year (with a little help from that company that quite surprisingly uses a similar colour scheme). We’re talking about Alexa (link is in German, but the pictures are fun nevertheless), the “shopping and leisure centre” currently being built on Alexanderplatz, right next to the bcc.

You know a person is of a certain importance when there is a Wikipedia entry dedicated to him or her. [Bert Bos][1] is such a person. Working for the [W3C][2], Bert Bos is one of the minds behind [CSS][3], the standard for Cascading Style Sheets.

Bert Bos will do two talks at 22c3: “W3C on Mobile, CSS, Multimodal and more” on day 1 and “The Web according to W3C” on day 3. Are these talks on hacking? We think so. While web page design normally has little to do with computer security, we prefer a broader definition of “hacking”, anyway. Conceiving and designing a system to bring art and …

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).

Zum ersten Mal in der Geschichte des Chaos Communication Congress können wir einen Referenten begrüßen, der aus dem höchsten Gremium der Politik in Deutschland kommt. Der SPD-Abgeordnete [Jörg Tauss][1] ist …

It’s time to share a little secret with you about the congress planning process. With hundreds of talks and workshops handed in, it’s hard to keep an overview. In fact, it’s probably impossible. During the planning phase of 21C3 (last year’s congress), we conceived and hacked Pentabarf, our open source conference planning tool and database frontend (don’t ask about the name, it’s a Discordian thing). Actually, “we” is not quite correct, our hero here is Sven, coder extraordinaire and high-order hacker, whom we probably cannot be grateful enough to for making this beautiful beast possible — …