Chaos Communication Congress

21C3 was just "w00t!" To me, it's been definitely the best Congress I've been to, with so many great talks and lectures, so much interesting discussions and fun with other people. To all those people who haven't been there: you definitely missed something.

I'm just coming from the 21C7 award ceremony, even with a prize, although I didn't win. I "only" got a special prize for the most inventive entry. The prize itself is a Toll Collect propaganda CD, sponsored by Volker Birk. Hooray! You can download my entry here.

64 bytes from xxx.xx.xxx.xx: icmp_seq=412 ttl=53 time=16678.5 ms
I only experienced such huge RTTs before only once, and that was when one of our switches at work was b0rken due to evil electrons that came through the network cables (i.e. creeping current).

Today I had my lightning talk, starting at around 11. I was the second in row, it took me only 4:32 to present TPP, and about one more minute to answer all the open questions. I even got scene applause for showing the slide-in feature. Then, I watched the other lightning talks, some of which were quite interesting, too. After that, Thomas Warwaris presented some really funny and new things about software patents, followed by Richard who gave interesting insight into the area of natural language steganography. Even though Richard had explained the whole topic to me before, I heard a lot of new things about steganography in general and ways of breaking steganography. Unfortunately, there are not really any good lectures until the late evening, so I have to find something else to waste time without getting too bored.

Time for a first update on the 21C3: Yesterday, we arrived here in Berlin. At the airport in Vienna, we met Jule who was taking the same flight. The flight itself was extremely turbulent, from Vienna as far as the border from Czechia to Germany, from 3000 to 30000 feet. And just when the turbulences ended, we started the sinking flight again. Oh, and I spilled my apple juice all over Richard.

After we landed, we first brought our luggage to the youth hostel, and then bought our tickets for the 3 days. After that, we went for a quick snack and a long chat, and then Richard and me back to the hostel. Then night was turbulent, too, as we were woken up 3 times by different events...

Today started w/ coffee and donuts, and then lectures all day. Quick lunch at Burger King, then back to BCC. I bought the Conference Proceedings of 21C3 (finally they have some! with ISBN! Hooray!), 400 pages of hacker-related papers for EUR 25, a fair price methinks. Right now, I'm enjoying real net that actually works for the first time. Thanks to Teemu for the beer!

Today, I'm going to Berlin. First, from Linz to Vienna by train, then a shuttle bus to Vienna Airport, and from Vienna Airport to Berlin Tegel. We should arrive at around 13:50. Afterwards we will first bring our stuff to our hostel, and then go to BCC to buy our tickets for 21C3. After that... we don't know yet. If anybody needs to contact me, here's my mobile phone number: +43/699/17778107.

Note to self: must-sees in the 21C3 conference schedule:

• Day 1:
  • 11:00 - 12:00: Hidden Data in Internet Published Documents
  • 12:00 - 13:00: Inside PDF (x)
  • 13:00 - 14:00: Enforcing the GNU GPL (x)
  • 14:00 - 15:00: Biometrie in Ausweisdokumenten
  • 15:00 - 16:00: Edit This Page - Scaling the Wiki Beyond 1 Million (x)
  • 16:00 - 17:00: Verified Fiasco - ein Projekt zur formalen Analyse und zum Beweisen der totalen Korrektheit des Mikrokern-Betriebssystems Fiasco
  • 22:00 - 23:00: Free Software in South America (x)
  • 23:00 - 24:00: Das Literarische Code-Quartett (x)
• Day 2:
  • 11:00 - 12:00: Lightning Talks: Day 2 (x)
  • 12:00 - 13:00: Softwarepatente - der Tag danach (x)
  • 13:00 - 14:00: Natural Language Steganography (x)
  • 15:00 - 17:00: Bluetooth Hacking
  • 23:00 - 24:00: Fnord-Jahresrückblick
• Day 3:
  • 11:00 - 12:00: Toll Collect - Verpeilen im industriellen Maßstab
  • 15:00 - 16:00: Practical Mac OS X Insecurity
  
  
  • 16:00 - 17:00: The Reality of Network Address Translators
  • 19:00 - 21:00: Security Nightmares 2005
  
  

Update: changed a few things, due to changes in the Fahrplan. Fortunately, I can now see both "Natural Language Steganography" and "Softwarepatente - der Tag danach".
Update 2: the "(x)" means "seen".

As reported here, the preliminary version 0.9 of the conference schedule on the 21C3, the "Fahrplan", is finally available. A number of really interesting talks are on the schedule, so I'm already happily looking forward to the conference.