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 …

Without powerful spam filters nothing goes nowadays. This is no new insight for most of us, since the amount of unsolicited commercial e-mail gets more and more each day. But filtering communication always has unwanted side effects. Peter Eisentraut, developer, IT consultant and author of a book regarding spam and virus fighting with Open Source tools, will talk about consequences for the overall stability, performance and usability of the email system in general. He has been involved in some large installations for German companies and government agencies, so he made some very interesting …

Antenne has posted a 22C3 wallpaper (desktop pictures) in various sizes. Consider this being the first move in rolling out our 22C3 design. We put it all in a single place once we have set up the 22C3 Public Wiki (coming soon).

2005 was the year where some of our biggest privacy related nightmares became true. 4 years after 9/11 and a couple of months after the bombings of London everything seems possible in the name of public safety. Some decisions were made without any democratic legitimation like passports with biometric characteristics and RFID or area-wide deployment of video surveillance. Beside that the European ministers of Justice and the European Commission want to keep all telephone and internet traffic as well as the telephone positioning data of all 450 million Europeans. A numerous amount of supporting …

Another important technology which isn’t brand new but implies a big impact here and now is RFID. RFID is used for automatic identification and detection and is i.e. used for logistic purposes to keep track of products on their way from manufacturers to customers. But this technique also has privacy concerns since it’s used in modern passports or even in tickets for the Soccer World Championships in Germany next year, which isn’t funny at all. So it’s important to understand how it works and what exactly can be done with it. The main problem by now is, that a detailed knowledge of the …

Not only since the acquisition of Skype by eBay this year Voice-over-IP is a hot topic. VoIP uses packet-swichted networks for data flow instead of traditional dedicated, circuit-switched voice transmission lines, so it has some of the usual security implications plus a few more and it also rises the usual longings from governments to intercept this traffic. Although the different techniques and implementations are more or less well known by now, there are still many things to look after.

First of all we’ll have an overview over the intentions of regulating VoIP and NGN (Next Generation …

In the last week we informed all the people who submitted a talk for the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress about the decisions of the program committee. Just in case: If you submitted a lecture to the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress and got no email from the program committee about our decision please write an email to 22c3-content _at_ cccv.de and let us know. We are quite sure we forgot no one, but thanks to the Verpeilungsfaktor we never know.

As you can read for example

here, here and here some speakers are quite exited to hold a talk at the congress. As every year we refused some talks …

Last year we heard lots of complaints about too many interesting things going on at the same time, too many talks missed because of people oversleeping and too many people squeezing in small lecture halls. So we decided to change some things.

First of all there is the fourth day, which gives us the possibility to invite more interesting talks and gives you the chance to listen to more of them without the need of time travel or astral projections. Second the conference program starts at noon and ends at midnight. That provides one hour more sleep to all of us, so everyone can be brighter than …

The program committee finished the main part of its work at the last weekend of October. While the sun was shining over Berlin we pushed lots and lots pieces of paper over the floor of the cccb to create the perfect Fahrplan. There is no better user interface when it comes to multi player multi tasking fahrplan construction. As in the last year the program will be marvelous and we will present lots of interesting speakers and talks in this weblog.

But first some numbers about this years Fahrplan: We received nearly 300 lecture submissions and selected about the half of them for the conference …

This year’s Chaos Communication Congress’s motto is “Private Investigations”. Thinking of private investigators, the first thing that may come to your mind is the image of a hard boiled yet well-intentioned guy in a trench coat who solves problems in his own special way, as depicted in film-noir classics, such as The Maltese Falcon starring Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade. The lone wolf, the rōnin, the mysterious guy working on his own are well-established metaphors the media has repeatedly used when describing hackers. As with many things that happen when media realities and …

This is the new CCC Events blog. It’s a in the footsteps of last year’s 21C3 Weblog and is primarily intended to provide in-depth and up-front information on the upcoming “22C3: Private Investigations” conference.