Currently, the C3 is taking place in Leipzig/Germany. C3 is the Chaos Communication Congress, the annual gathering of white hat hackers and folks interested in IT/privacy issues. It is organized by the German hackers association Chaos Computer Club.
For a long time this event was considered as gathering of weirdos. This years’ edition is already the 36th - with 17000 (!!!) participants from all over the world. Tickets were sold just within minutes. The event has evolved from a pure community gathering to a global gathering on privacy and IT security. Still, it preserved its community and do-it-yourself spirit l, its solution orientation and has not been taken over by privacy industry.
At least in Germany, media coverage is quite good as on a regular basis, C3 is the place where some important IT system/infrastructure hacks are being revealed.
The complete event line-up can be found here or on an F-Droid app. Most talks are in English, (some are even available with French translation), all of them will be published at https://media.ccc.de/c/36c3 and on Youtube (just look for 36c3).
Among the ones that are already put online, there are two talks I’d like to share with you:
There are some other talks that might me interesting to some of you:
Interesting talk, although I do not agree on all: The ecosystem is moving, Moxi Marlinspike, Founder of Signal. “Challenges for distributed and decentralized technology from the perspective of Signal development”
Creating Resilient and Sustainable Mobile Phones
First part of the talk is on the theory of how a resilient mobile phone should be shaped. The second outlines how to make it. In my opinion really an outstanding one: “Civil society depends on the continuing ability of citizens to communicate with one another, without fear of interference, deprivation or eavesdropping. As the international political climate changes alongside that of our physical climatic environment, we must find ways to create mobile communications systems that are truly resilient and sustainable in the face of such shocks. We have therefore identified a number of freedoms that are required for resilient mobile phones: Energy, Communications, Security, Innovation, Maintenance and Scale-Dependency. These can be summarised as making it possible for people to create, maintain and develop mobile communications solutions, without requiring the capital and resources of a large company to do so. In this lecture I will explain why each of these is necessary, as well as describing how we are incorporating these principles into the MEGAphone open, resilient and secure smart-phone project […].”