Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

A bit late, but here are some more random notes from 23C3:

• I didn't see much of the surrounding programs, workshops, projects etc. of the congress, as I was attending tons of lectures all day long. Most of the time I was even recording a lecture from a different room via DVB-T (for later viewing) while watching a "live" lecture in the room where I was sitting with my laptop.
• I met some LinuxBIOS people at the congress (no hacking, though). However, Peter Stuge did a nice 5 minute presentation on LinuxBIOS in one of the Lightning Talks sessions. A video should be available soon.
• Like ca. 1000 other people, I bought some of the Sputnik active 2.4GHz RFID tags for tracking and hacking purposes. There's some data mining going on using the data collected during the 4 days of the congress. This is an experiment to demonstrate the possibilities of tracking and surveillance with today's technology in order to hopefully make the people (and politicians) more aware of the associated threats and risks... Btw, the hardware is licensed under a Creative Commons license, the software is GPL'd, so feel free to contribute!
• I barely slept 2 hours a day during the whole conference, so I needed lots of time for recreation afterwards... But it was very well worth it!

For everybody who might be interested in this kind of stuff: the LinuxBIOS project's annual LinuxBIOS Symposium will take place October 1st-3rd, 2006 in the nice German city Hamburg.

In the light of the recent discussions about "sourceless firmware" and similar issues in Debian, some people might be interesting in helping with (or at least getting informed about) a practical project related to this - a free (GPL'd) BIOS replacement. It's quite likely that some OLPC people will be there, too, as the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project employs LinuxBIOS on their hardware...

Deadline for workshop and talk proposals is September 10th (if you should plan to give a talk), and a preliminary agenda is already available online. The registration process has also recently started (deadline is September 11th). See this post for the full announcement.

Now, if I manage to somehow gather a reasonably large amount of Euros, I'll probably be there.

Update 2006-09-11: I have decided to register for the conference, so I'll be there! Anyone else?

OK, I will make this short because a gazillion of other people will probably blog about the 22C3 for several days or weeks to come... Today (last day) I only attended one talk — Bluetooth Hacking - The State of The Art. Funny stuff you can do with Bluetooth...

All in all it was a great conference. Get the proceedings or browse the list of talks (most of them have PDFs attached) for more details. Videos of all talks should be available anytime soon (I hope!).

Oh, and the 22C3 is probably the only event where you will see such signs (attached to walls by the congress staff!)...