The videos are online from the 38th Chaos Communication Congress (38C3). It took place in Hamburg, from Friday the 27th through Monday the 30th 2024. The conference is organized every year by the Chaos Computer Club e. V. (CCC) which is Europe's largest association of hackers. The CCC also organizes campaigns, events, lobbying, publications, anonymizing services, communication infrastructure and even hackerspaces.
The Congress is always interesting, so picking semi-randomly from the English subset of talks at the 38C3 highlights include:
- We've not been trained for this: life after the Newag DRM disclosure - a follow up to last year's presentation on DRM in passenger trains in Poland
- From Silicon to Sovereignty: How Advanced Chips are Redefining Global Dominance - chip manufacturing
- Breaking NATO Radio Encryption - a weakend ÆSderivative
- A fully free BIOS with GNU Boot - an overview
Previously:
(2017) 34th Chaos Communication Congress (34C3) Presentations Online
(2014) The Fall of Hacker Groups
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The earlier, bigger part of hacking history often had congregations as protagonists. From CCC in the early 80s to TESO in the 2000s, through LoD, MoD, cDc, L0pht, and the many other sung and unsung teams of hacker heroes, our culture was created, shaped, and immortalized by their articles, tools, and actions.
Why don't we see many hacker groups anymore? And why is that that the few which are around, such as Anonymous and its satellite efforts, do not have the same cultural impact as their forefathers?
The presentations from the 34th Chaos Communication Congress (34C3) are online now that the conference has concluded. The 34C3 took place from December 27 through December 30, this time in Leipzig. The presentations were in English or German, with translations available from one to the other.
Some presentations are more technical, others not so much. One of the more popular non-technical presentations was author Charlie Stross on Dude, you broke the Future!
(Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Thursday January 02, @02:52PM (2 children)
About 1/3 German language; which is fine given the location. Just keep in mind a significant fraction of talks are "Queersupport - weil junge Queers ein offenes Ohr brauchen!"
A lot of entryism and related topics. "Cat ears were just the beginning: Six years in onesies & what it taught me about life" "Postpartum Punk: make space for unfiltered creativity" "Sacrificing Chickens Properly: Why Magical Thinking is Both the Problem and the Solution."
There are some talks where people miss some points. "Drawing with circuits – creating functional and artistic PCBs together" Thats nice for digital work, but if you want functional and artistic looking PCBs, go into microwave RF, those boards look pretty cool. (I skimmed this, perhaps the presenter mentioned that)
Cons seem fairly international-ized in terms of topics, so if you live closer to NYC or Vegas just attend the local cons, you won't miss too many topics if you attend other cons.
Time is expensive. I used to attend HOPE in NYC, but I can't afford the time. Maybe when I'm older. I would theorize "hacker cons" will eventually have an age distribution similar to amateur radio where it's mostly teens and retired folks because those are the people with the most spare time. I barely have time to watch videos now.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Thursday January 02, @04:30PM (1 child)
I would abhor a conference drifting off-topic in such a way. However, this seems to be the only talk about queerness/gender issues, which is tolerable IMO, as there is overlap (and possibly enrichment) between queer and computer-affine people. Actually, there seems to be a second one totaling roughly 2%.
Certainly, there also some politics talks as well, the slant being left-leaning. Just skip what you don't like.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday January 02, @05:03PM
Historically has not been a viable long strategy to entryism in any form of media. More enter until the legacy population who started the thing leave entirely. Rinse and repeat in the next environment. Hopefully you're right and I'm wrong as I do like conferences.
(Score: 2, Informative) by pTamok on Thursday January 02, @03:19PM (1 child)
Thank you to the editor for adding the sup tags.
Might it be an idea to mention in which month the event took place?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday January 02, @04:27PM
Earlier this week. I've been talking about this to folks on other sites, trying to figure out which videos I'd want to download and watch later.
CCC is FAST very FAST. Many cons don't upload video for weeks or even months or try to get people to pay for access (more popular historically). And no I double checked this is not the videos from last con, this is literally from, like this Monday.
Emacsconf 2024 was first week of December and they had all the videos up in time for Christmas which I'd consider unusually fast for a conference, CCC is even faster. NDC corporate-slop sometimes has some gems in a sea of not-gems and they take a quarter to third of a year to upload.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02, @05:24PM
https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-police-2-0-peaceful-activism-is-terrorism-and-fakenews-are-facts [media.ccc.de]
Pretty grim picture of what happens when international authoritarianism meets rigidly-defined software interfaces.
https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-microbes-vs-mars-a-hacker-s-guide-to-finding-alien-life [media.ccc.de]
A fun talk about cool stuff.
(Score: 2) by corey on Thursday January 02, @10:18PM
… I’ve just opened another 15 tabs on my phone which I’ve been trying to cut down on!
I will need to find a few hours to get through turn all but sounds very interesting.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday January 02, @11:06PM
The one on satellite hacking looks 10/10, but I'm getting an error pulling the video. Will try again when I get home.