Better late then never, here's a short review of the 25th Chaos Communication Congress that took place in Berlin from December, 27th till December 30th. First I'll give a few general remarks and will later tell you a few things about the talks I saw.
The Congress was organized very well, though the wireless was very flaky. The catering was priced OK (a tea was 1€) the talks were mostly of a very high quality and there were many interesting projects there that allowed you to see what they were up to (like OLPC guys, Debian, Gentoo and people building little helicopters). The whole atmosphere was very creative, very motivating and fun. The talks started late enough to allow you to get enough sleep and a good breakfast. The congress was sold out on the first day so I think they'll have to move to a bigger location for next year; this made the whole building very very crowded on the later days and it was sometimes hard to get seats to certain talks. To get a few more direct impressions from the whole thing, check the identi.ca
#25c3 hashtag.
Now let's look at some of the talks I saw. I'll tell you which talks I saw and whether they were good so you can decide whether you want to check them out yourself: All talks were recorded and can be
downloaded from the official page. If any of the talks I hint at sounds interesting to you, you should absolutely grab the recording (they even offer them in a format that you can check out on your Ipod or other mobile devices).
Day 1 (27th)
Datenpannen - Forderungen nach dem jahr der Datenverbrechen was a good talk. 2008 had seen many privacy related disasters in Germany and many other countries where private data of people was leaked into the wild, those cases were summarized and a bunch of requirements for the future were derived. Nothing spectacular but still a great way to get into the congress (talk in German).
The Trust Situation - Why the idea of data protection slowly turns out to be protective sounded like a really interesting talk but turned out to lack focus. There were some problems with out concepts of data protection outlined but in the end you were left with an hour of (to me) pretty random slides that just kinda happened. But a good tickler for your own brain to think about a few aspects.
Der Hackerparagraph 202c StGB - Bestandsaufnahme und Auswirkungen was a fun talk outlining the problems with a German law that forbids the use end development of "hacker tools". Since most tools in that respect are of clear dual use: The good and the bad guys use them just for different purposes. If you already followed the discussion somewhat this talk does not bring a lot of news but it's still somewhat fun. (talk in German)
About Cyborgs and Gargoyles - State of the art in wearable computing sounded like a brilliant talk but turned out to be one of the worst I saw. It was pretty much the summary of one guy's PhD and mixed the typical "academic" namedropping ("this work was done by X,Y,Z, Professor A, Professor B..." ), which made the whole thing really annoying to listen to, with carefully mentioning every corporate sponsor of whichever project (which might be relevant when you want to make your masters happy but for people interested in the contents it just sucks cause you sound like an advertising machine. It was not a big summary detailing what people do, but just him talking about his (and his friends and coworker's) projects. Pretty much a wasted hour.
Terrorist All-Stars - Some cases of terrorism around the world that are not terrorist at all was a great talk. It outlined many cases all over the world where anti-terrorist laws was used to shut critics up and to fight demonstrations and other completely legal and desirable expressions of people's personal opinions. The style was maybe somewhat dry at times but it's absolutely worth checking out!
Das Grundrecht auf digitale Intimsphäre - Festplattenbeschlagnahme in neuem Licht outlined, how the confiscation of hard disks has to bee seen considering the given German laws. It explained the legal basics and described the everyday life of a judge in Germany (one of the people talking was a judge). Interesting talk in German.
Beyond Asimov - Laws for Robots - Developing rules for autonomous systems was an awesome talk. It outlined how autonomous systems work, what the state of the art is and why Asimovs Laws are great for stories but suck for real work use. In the end it outlined a new process that could make autonomous systems a lot safer to use. The slides, the style of the talk and the topic were all fun, you should absolutely check the talk out!
Advanced memory forensics: The Cold Boot Attacks - Recovering keys and other secrets after power off outlined how you can extract data from RAM even after the computer has been shut down. You might already have heard about the cold-boot attack but the talk gave some extra details in a fun way and outlined a few strategies to mitigate the risks though the problem isn't solved yet. Talk worth checking out!
Why were we so vulnerable to the DNS vulnerability? was Dan Kaminsky at his best. He outlined not so much his DNS Hack but what he did around it, what needed to be done to fix the problem and how he went to get that fix out in the wild. He also showed a bunch of lessons we can learn from that problem in our current state where we rely so much on so old standards and technologies. Definitely get this talk and watch it. You'll be entertained for an hour and learn something
This ended the first day for me that had begun around 4 am when I had to get up to reach the train to Berlin.
Day 2 (28th)
Embracing Post-Privacy - Optimism towards a future where there is "Nothing to hide" was not a bad talk, it was actually a good mind-tickler though I saw a few
problems with the referent's thesis. All in all it was a talk that you should probably check out if you are interested in privacy.
Attacking Rich Internet Applications - Not your mother's XSS bugs was not a bad talk, they showed a few interesting XSS attacks but all in all the talk was somewhat dry and I found that the heavy Italian accent made it hard for me to follow the talk. Interesting but not great.
Vulnerability discovery in encrypted closed source PHP applications was somewhat dry, too, cause it dealt with PHP Bytecode generation and such but was interesting, especially if you ever had to work with encrypted PHP applications (which suck donkey butt btw
).
Scalable Swarm Robotics - Formica: a cheap, open research platform was awesome. The guys built super-cheap autonomous robots that can communicate on stock parts which runs on an open platform so you can play with it, too. Those robots looked like fun, /me wants some. Check the talk out and tell the guys you want a kit so they start selling them
Rapid Prototype Your Life - The time is now to make anything you can imagine was probably one of the most fun talks I saw. Bre Pettis is just a joy to listen too and the idea of being able to just make things rocks. Also, if I was manufacturer of Laser Cutters, I'd hire him to do my advertising. Download the talk, you will not regret spending an hour on it, it's probably
the talk I recommend most. (Fun fact, you can hear me asking a question at about the 51th minute
)
The Infinite Library - Storage and Access of Pornographic Information was a fun talk about the organisation of Porn and how different people handle it. On a more serious note it was a talk about semantics and semantic structures in data which might not been what many people took away from it, but it can still give you some great ideas about semantic representation of data. The listener questions were especially fun so check that talk out, too.
Fnord News Show - Wir helfen Euch, die Fnords zu sehen was pretty much a just for fun thing. Big fuckups of corporations, individuals or governments were shown and some even got prizes, a fun hour that I listened to in German but that's also available in English.
Soviet Unterzoegersdorf - A Nation In Transit. I don't exactly know how to describe this. It's art/comedy and most of all: Fun! The nation of "Soviet Unterzoegersdorf" tells about its struggles in "bringing socialism to the world" which songs and talks and video games. Download it.
This ended the second day.
Day 3 (29th)
I didn't attend any talks this day cause me and my girlfriend slept late and went to the opera (La Traviata) and out for dinner in the evening. The day was great but you cannot download any of it
Day 4 (30th)
Why technology sucks - If technology is the solution, politicians are the problem tried to outline why you cannot solve non-technical problems with technology but somewhere lost its train of thought (probably cause the intended speaker couldn't make it to the congress). Not a bad talk but somewhat unstructured.
Not Soy Fast: Genetically Modified, Resource Greedy, and coming to a Supermarket Near You - The silent march of the multinational GMO soy industry and its growing power in South America, the EU, and around the World. A talk about food, especially soy, and how pretty much one company own "our foodchain" (Monsanto). Apart from showing how much of the world's food is in the hands of very few companies it also summarized a few problems with copyright ("What happens when the copyrighted, genetically modified soy from Monsanto somhow crosses into your unmodified crops? The Answer: You have to pay huge fees for copyright infringement"). Fun talk, worth downloading.
Wikileaks - Wikileaks vs. the World dealt with the wikileaks project and what they did so far. They outlined a few of the technical and non-technical problems they had to overcome and ended with a call for support of their project to get the information out into the public that we all want and need to be out there, things that governments and corporations don't want the public to know. The talk was somewhat dry but still not bad.
MD5 considered harmful today - Creating a rogue CA Certificate was probably (apart from Dan Kaminsky's talk on DNS)
the most anticipated talk of the congress. The researchers showed how the combinations of the weakness in MD5 and the way certain SSL certificate vendors implemented their issuing allowed them to create a rogue certificate authority that was accepted by all major browsers out of the box. That would have allowed them (in combination with Kaminsky's DNS attack) to take over pretty much any website including every SSL signed website without any way for the end-user to notice the tampering. Awesome talk if you are interested in security and the web.
After the talk I had to leave to catch my train home.
Summarizing I gotta say that I loved it. Where I might as many have trouble listening to people talk about stuff I don't really care about (especially in "academic contexts") I never had any trouble to listen to the talks at the 25c3. Most speakers were well prepared and showed deep understanding of what they were talking about plus they were very open to suggestions and very approachable. I don't know of any other conference that allows you to get into contact with interesting people as easy as the Chaos Communication Congress.
Thanks go out to my girlfriend who came with me to Berlin and to
Splitbrain who I did spend quite some time with at the congress. Let's hope we can repeat that next year!
The mono module is a bit more complicated, because there is the whole concern about building mono using mono. So I recommend using
Since I removed my local file server Kayasuma and replaced it with a local Linksys NSLU2 (running Debian) and a vServer for my mails and probably some web projects the thing you can see in the included pictures is up for grabs. It's a 
If you run a local fileserver and want to make sure that you can properly shut it down in case of a power shortage drop me a comment.
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