33C3 talks

Society

What's the CCC Congress?

The Chaos Computer Club (CCC) Congress is the annual meeting of the CCC, which is a German "hacker" club with broad interests in the interplay between culture, society and technology. Traditionally, the Congress is held at the end of the year and offers a wide range of talks. Unfortunately, I couldn't attend the Congress this year. Luckily, the Congress organizers did a tremendously good job and recorded and put up the videos for free on the internet, so everyone can learn from the conference. In the next sections, I'll link to the videos I watched and found interesting.

Day 1

33C3 Opening Ceremony

The Congress motto this year is "Works for me". What does that mean? If I understand the introduction video correctly, it's an encouragement to stand up and act to make society better, especially in the light of recent surveillance and security laws passed in the world, as well as the growing sense of parochialism in our connected world.

The Global Assassination Grid

A talk about the current state of the drone program that kills people in the middle-east. One of the scary points made by the presenter is that there is a Milgram experiment-like dilution of responsibilities by the many operators involved in flying the drone.

Shut Up and Take My Money!

A talk about an online banking service that revealed itself full of security holes.

Kampf dem Abmahnunwesen

If you've illegally downloaded a movie in Germany these days, there's a chance that you've fallen victim to the massive legal milking conducted in the form of Abmahnungen. This talk explains you how to fight these overreaching law firms and the future of this malpractice.

A Data Point Walks Into a Bar

A talk about how to make better data presentations when they are about humans.

Software Defined Emissions

A technical follow-up on last year's Dieselgate talk with some more data obtained throughhacking ECUs (engine control units). Together with the other Dieselgate talk, it provides a good explanation of the defeat devices that were exposed to be used by all carmakers. This talk ends on a positive note: Opel implemented the correct functions on an ECU instead of trying to detect testing cycles, which yielded a less polluting engine.

Day 2

Von Kaffeeriechern, Abtrittanbietern und Fischbeinreißern

An interesting talk (in German) about how time makes jobs obsolete and how to relate to this phenomenon as humans.

3 Years After Snowden: Is Germany fighting State Surveillance?

When I attended 31C3 in December 2014, the world was still upset about Edward Snowden and what this meant. Three years later, I get the feeling we still haven't taken notice. This talk presents recent developments in Germany, which granted a new law and more funds to the BND (the german intelligence service). This has happened all other the world in recent years (in France in particular). It seems the pattern is always the same: politicians propose to increase surveillance powers of national security agencies under the cover of fighting terrorism which legalizes past practices that were technically against the law. So the question is: when will people finally notice that you can't fight terrorism this way? And when will they realize that this is all about power, nothing else? Edward Snowden makes a live intervention at the end of the conference, which is well worth listening too. My recap above is basically a rephrasing of his arguments.

Day 3

Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité... and privacy ?!

This talk describes the state of France in the wake of Snowden, recent terrorism in France (Charlie, November 2015, 14th of July 2016, ...), the state of emergency and the surveillance laws. Not a nice picture, especially with the 2017 elections coming up.

Machine Dreams

A superb talk on the state of artificial intelligence and what it tells about us humans. The presenter shows his perspective on what sort of thinking machines we could be, drawing on neuroscience, physics and computation.

Talking Behind Your Back

A talk about ultrasound tracking technologies that may or may not be used in your smartphone.

Day 4

The Ultimate Game Boy Talk

A really interesting talk about how the gameboy works. It made me think of this blog post by Jake vanderPlas where he extracts Super Mario sprites from a rom as well as my own (poor) attempt at recreating Game Boy sounds from the description of the hardware capabilities.

Closing words

I'm sure there are many other great talks that I don't know about that were given at 33C3. I'm looking forward to recommendations in the comments section below. In any case, I think the CCC Congress is a great meeting place to think about the future of our society and technology.

Notebook

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