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
Related Stories
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 videos from the 39C3 are all in place, and Cory Doctorow's fast-paced talk, A post-American, enshittification-resistant Internet, is among them.
That talk is worth special mention. Don't be put off by the gratuitous cursing or the CCC's misspelling of the name Internet. And because it's often easier, and always faster, to just read text than slog through a video, Cory has also posted a transcript of his presentation:
We won that skirmish, but friends, I have bad news, news that will not surprise you. Despite wins like that one, we have been losing the war on the general purpose computer for the past 25 years.
Which is why I've come to Hamburg today. Because, after decades of throwing myself against a locked door, the door that leads to a new, good internet, one that delivers both the technological self-determination of the old, good [I]nternet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0 that let our normie friends join the party, that door has been unlocked.
Today, it is open a crack. It's open a crack!
His presentation is good all the way through, even to the final Q & A.
Basically, the gist is that 1) the US dollar is no longer a (semi-)neutral platform and 2) the threat of withdrawing financial support has already been played and cannot be used for leverage any more. Countries are now forced to actively work around both points, which is inconvenient and expensive, but the result is that they have been liberated from similar future threats and thus in that way have regained a bit of independence as far as software laws go. That liberation is because economic retaliation has already occurred, nations can more or less safely undo the anti-circumvention laws forced down their throats by "free" trade "agreements". The first country to do so will be able to take a very big bite out of the trillions of dollars (or euros) which Apple and the others currently collect.
What other 39C3 presentations have soylentils found interesting in a positive way?
Previously:
(2025) The 39th Chaos Communication Congress (39C3) Taking Place Now in Hamburg Through 30 Dec 2025
(2025) 38th Chaos Communication Congress (38C3) Presentations Online
(2017) 34th Chaos Communication Congress (34C3) Presentations Online
Cory Doctorow Proposes How to Break Free From Digital Domination
So far, every country in the world has had one of two responses to the Trump tariffs. The first one is: "Give Trump everything he asks for (except Greenland) and hope he stops being mad at you." This has been an absolute failure. Give Trump an inch, he'll take a mile. He'll take fucking Greenland. Capitulation is a failure.
But so is the other tactic: retaliatory tariffs. That's what we've done in Canada (like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian). Our top move has been to levy tariffs on the stuff we import from America, making the things we buy more expensive. That's a weird way to punish America! It's like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can, and hoping the downstairs neighbor says "Ouch!"
And it's indiscriminate. Why whack some poor farmer from a state that begins and ends with a vowel with tariffs on his soybeans. That guy never did anything bad to Canada.
But there's a third possible response to tariffs, one that's just sitting there, begging to be tried: what about repealing anticircumvention law?
If you're a technologist or an investor based in a country that's repealed its anticircumvention law, you can go into business making disenshittificatory products that plug into America's defective tech exports, allowing the people who own and use those products to use them in ways that are good for them, even if those uses make the company's shareholders mad.
Simple premise, interesting ramifications - I wonder what the course corrections will look like...
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 2025, @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 2025, @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 2025, @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 2025, @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 2025, @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 2025, @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 2025, @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 2025, @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.