35C3

Easterhegg and CLT are approaching, yet I did not write about 35C3. A small recap from a distance.

A friend of mine told a friend of hers about my whereabouts during the post-christmas and pre-new-years time. Her friend replied, given the brief details: “This does not sound like a conference at all. This is a festival!” And well, I guess she is absolutely right.

The Chaos Communication Congress is scarcely maintained in the conference format by some rules and the German winter (take away the winter and you’d have full blown festival). Colorful people from all walks of life, stupid-awesome ideas and projects everywhere, concentrated work, artistic expression, technological, social, ecological, _insert cause here_ projects from all over Germany and the world - 35C3 is really a big caleidoscope of human progress. Especially in the evening hours, the once chilled out atmosphere explodes into pure life. People eating, chatting, meditating, coding, drinking, dancing, listening, fooling around - all this and much more in a welcoming atmosphere.

To add a little gravitas to my fanboying, I will list some interesting talks I watched:

• SiliVaccine: North Korea’s Weapon of Mass Detection - How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Backdoor: a digital detective story, very entertaining.
• Hacking Ecology - How Data Scientists can help to avoid a sixth global… - one my favorite persons to listen to; keep up to date or join the small group formed after the talk: 1, 2
• What The Fax?! - Hacking your network likes it’s 1980 again - sometimes I dream about being a digital archeologist 50 years from now uncovering the strange ideas the people had; this talk will take you in the direction.
• Desinformation und Fake News - Bekämpfung und Verifizierung leicht gemacht - an inside light perspective of combating fake news which is a lot more ‘hands-on’ than I would’ve anticipated; talk is in German, but a translation is available.
• “Das ist mir nicht erinnerlich.” − Der NSU-Komplex heute - Fünf Monate nach dem Urteil im ersten NSU-Prozess - 35C3 is all fun and games, yet it is essential to remember the darker sides of German society, the NSU is one aspect of those; English translation available.
• Planes and Ships and Saving Lives - How soft and hardware can play a key role in saving lives… - great people who want to save lives in the Mediterranean.

This is only a small subset of my “needs to be watched” list of 35C3 talks, feel free to wander around the archive and put Youtube/Netflix on the bench for a couple of days or weeks.