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!

Some observations while on an 8 hour (night) train ride to the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress (23C3) in Berlin:

• DVB-T doesn't really work exceptionally well in a train that's moving at 200-300 km/h.
• I also had almost no GPS signal in the train either, not sure why. The speed should not be a problem as GPS is supposed to work at high speeds (unlike DVB-T). I intended to create a nice visualization of all wireless networks on the way to Berlin (using Kismet and GPSDrive), but... well, without GPS data that's not too funny.
• They have coffee in the train! Not exactly cheap, but it's there.
• Having a ticket for waggon 23 of the train is somewhat... fitting.

There's a lot of press coverage about the congress already, so I won't repeat all of that here. Just let me tell you that there's a tremendous amount of great lectures, many of which I have attended (and they're also streamed on the web, as well as broadcast via DVB-T locally here in Berlin, which is great!).

A few days ago police in Poland arrested a 17 year old kid who ran a mini-farm of cannabis inside his PC. The PC was normally used but modded to contain a light source, and keep humidity and temperature at proper levels.

The kids these days...

(via Boing Boing)

• A quantum computer program has produced an answer without actually running. Quantum mechanics is strange.
• Googlebot was based on lynx all these years? WTF? Google is strange.
• Explanation of the Anomalies of Water. Yeah, water is strange, too.

Tim Pritlove Jens (argh, need some sleep!) from the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has asked for more english blog posts about 22C3, the upcoming hacker conference in Berlin. So here you go.

Reminder:

The 22nd Chaos Communication Congress (22C3) is a four-day conference on technology, society and utopia. The Congress offers lectures and workshops on a multitude of topics including (but not limited to) information technology, IT-security, internet, cryptography and generally a critical-creative attitude towards technology and the discussion about the effects of technological advances on society.

The congress (sub-titled "Private Investigations") will be held from December 27th to 30th, 2005, in Berlin, Germany.

Some noteworthy bits and pieces:

• If I don't get hit by a bus, I'll be there.
• They have an (English) event blog which should keep you up to date.
• The 22C3 public wiki launched today.
• There are very nice 22C3 wallpapers available now (thanks to Antenne).
• The CongressRadio team will be podcasting during the congress.
• There is a 22C3 Planet (actually there are two).

This is gonna be one of the highlights of this year, I'm really looking forward to the congress.