Die SIGINT 2010, organisiert vom CCC, wird vom 22. bis 24. Mai 2010 im Kölner Mediapark stattfinden, der Call for Papers läuft schon eine Weile. Wer immer aktuell informiert sein will, kann jetzt auch den Twitter verfolgen.
SIGINT ist eine Kontraktion aus SIGnal INTelligence, das in etwa Fernmeldeaufklärung oder elektronische Aufklärung bedeutet.
Eine Anmeldung für das diesjährige Easterhegg in München ist nun möglich. Das Anmeldeformular macht den Weg frei für vier Tage Spaß am Gerät, attraktive Workshops sowie die Kaffee- und Frühstücksflatrate (inklusive Tasse).
Das Easterhegg ist eine regelmäßig durchgeführte Veranstaltung des Chaos Computer Clubs. Die Teilnehmer kommen aus dem gesamten Bundesgebiet, vereinzelt auch aus dem Ausland. Es finden hauptsächlich Workshops statt, aber auch einige Vorträge. Abgedeckt wird das ganze Spektrum von Technik über Netzkultur, es ist aber vor allem ein Hacker-Szenetreff. Das Easterhegg ist nicht-kommerziell, alle Beteiligten arbeiten ehrenamtlich.
26c3 is over. Go see what you missed – it’s all there. During the last hours I went to see what the people behind the stages thought of this year’s congress.
A group that is hardly noticed by the general public is the kitchen crew: they prepare food for some 350 ‘Angels’, approx. 10% of all participants. ‘Angels’ are the helpers of the CCC events. They still have to pay for their ticket like everyone else and trade their work for food and a conference t-shirt. When asked what their goal was the kitchen crew said: we make the angels happy! And they believe that they succeeded by about 80%. Mostly this is done by preparing sandwiches – cooked food is prepared only for putting everything up and taking things down. Next year the kitchen crew would rather not share a room with the press group, they said, because it’s hard to reduce preparing food to non-interview times. While everyone in CCC says there really in favor of having the congress at the bcc also most everyone complained about space really being a problem…
Next to kitchen and press in the back of the ground floor is C.E.R.T., the Chaos Emergency Response Team. They, too, are satisfied with the general health and fire emergency situation, no serious injuries at the congress and one or the other burning ash trays, that was it. Most common problem are people who don’t sleep, don’t drink enough water and eventually start not feeling well at all. CERT also are the people who make sure that the aisles are kept free when talks are happening and seem quite confident about this role. But “We’re not genuinely evil – there’s reasons!”. Their wish for 2010: more showers. Both for others who get smelly after a while and for the CERT team members who don’t really get to go home:
“This year everyone was peaceful and cooperative and also they didn’t blow anything up.”
Across the hall is the speaker’s room where speakers can relax, leave their stuff and find all kinds of technical assistance. I’ve greatly admired the speaker’s room team for keeping perfectly calm in any kind of situation before. Also for them this year has been easy – no serious trouble except for one talk on day four that had to be cancelled because someone pulled the power plug from a old IBM machine that needs two hours to boot. They were happy to have had a sofa for the first time, about the friendly speakers and would appreciate less problems concerning ticket sales: sometimes speakers bring people who like to see that specific talk and then can’t get in – unpleasant for everyone involved.
Also widely unnoticed is the radio group, hidden behind the stairs of the top floor. Their recorded interviews are broadcast by different independent radios across Germany.
Much more visible is the Phone Operation Center, or POC. They run both a DECT phone network and – for the first time – a GSM (mobile phone) network, made just for the conference. Anyone who registers either their cordless or mobile phone can make calls to other registered conference participants free of charge. Numbers can be pre-registered at eventphone.de and there’s even a phone book. This year approx. 900 DECT phones were registered plus some 500 GSM phones. To the POC team it felt as if less people attended the congress – maybe due to less tickets that were sold? (This was contradicted in the closing event when an announcement was made that this was the biggest congress ever). They didn’t have the impression that the fact that both DECT and GSM phones can be listend in to had an influence during the last four days. The option that phones can be tapped isn’t all new. The phone people, generally 5 – 10 at the different CCC events, always come early because DECT phones are needed already to set everything up: These phones that are used for general organisational purposes, have four digit numbers starting with a 1, while everybody else gets numbers from 2000 on upwards. It is also possible to register EPVPN numbers that can be taken home to be used via Voice IP. All in all the POC crew was happy and has no wishes left to fulfill.
There’s many more people who work behind the scenes – couldn’t talk to them all, but there’s always a next congress. See you at SIGINT in May..
By Anne Roth, who was guest-blogging for the CCC
Christian Eichelmann from the Wolpertinger project will be speaking in Saal 3 starting at 11:30.
It is a distributed portscanner, which actually doesn’t do anything else than scan (tcp-)ports. But it is fast. Really fast. So fast you can scan Class-B networks before you have to retire. And it is available from here. The output lands in a database (SQLite) you can do with that what you want. It runs on linux and is open source.
The IBM AS/400 Talk in Saal 3 has been cancelled. There are no other reported schedule changes, but be sure to check back here on events.ccc.de, follow @26c3 and @chaosupdates on Twitter.
The first talk in the big hall on day three of 26c3 was the CCC’s retrospect of the year 2009. Due to my slow coffeemaker and hungry kids I missed the months of January and February (please add), and start recounting in March:
New CCC members
Next an unpleasant experience of a CCC member was told who had his house searched and all tech equipment confiscated. Law enforcement had believed that who owns a domain (of a bit torrent site in this case) also has the respective hardware at home. It prooved that all concerned law enforcers had no idea of what was going on and used their ignorance to keep all things taken in the raid until this December. Only through legal protection covered by the CCC it was given back in the end. Unfortunately German law doesn’t provide for relevant recompensation in such cases while in contrast it is quite easy to get a judge to sign a search warrant.
Constanze Kurz
In April some 400 people joined a demonstration against censorship. SIGINT, the CCC conference that focuses on politics and society more than the congress in December, took place in Cologne for the first time. The conference was generally perceived as a successful event included a workshop that was especially worth mentioning. Members of different political parties in Germany explained their views: to make a difference it’s not enough to get through with the point that something is factually wrong. It needs to be perceived as wrong by the public to make politicians move. The next SIGINT will again discuss politics in May in Cologne.
Frank Rieger
The CCC clearly is becoming of interest more when the press is seeking information of quotes: there were 1504 inquiries by the media, more than ever before. Germany’s social democrat party apparently has a rather peculiar understanding of confidential talks: during last year’s voting campaign not a lot of support was gathered by the party when it announced its stance pro internet censorship. As a result the CCC was invited to a meeting to discuss both this issue as well as online campaigning. Even though the party had originally asked to keep quiet about the meeting a press release was issued right after. Martin Dörmann, new speaker for new media issues of the SPD group in federal parliament since the former speaker was forced to resign after shady accusations that he possessed child pronography, was quoted. He said in the meeting: “Nobody is planning to erect a censorship infrastructure!”. Apparently without realising the strong resemblance to a historical quote by Walter Ulbricht less than two months before the Berlin wall was built: “Nobody has the intention to erect a wall”.
In June the CCC submitted its statement (pdf, German) on data retention to the constitutional court.
Also in June the local CCC in Mannheim set up a wireless connection that covered 50 km: another reason to point out the extraordinarily creative activities of the local groups. The concept of “geekends” was revived: one ERFA group invites another for a weekend, travel cost covered by the CCC.
In July the CCC apparently pleased itself enormously by discussing a new set of formal club rules which resulted in some members wondering whether it was a good decision to become a formal German Verein rather than a terrorist organisation, the other option. They then rewarded themselves with a new website that is a great step forward to user friendly content management which was implemented later. It does include WYSIWYG (contrary to this blog’s software, if I might add that). A wordle done using CCC website content showed that there is potential for improving language.
In August the hacker summer camp Hackers at Random (HAR) saw great parties and light installations by the CCC in the Netherlands. In September, due to the elections coming up, a panel discussion had the minister of justice, Brigitte Zypries, discussing technical details she’d better not discuss in public. A source of joy for many hackers present.
Martin Haase
The CCC won a legal battle against the company producing the optical scan voting system meant to be used in Hamburg. The company hat attempted to stop the CCC from publicly claiming to have found technical flaws of the system. The decision by a court in Hamm favored the CCCs point of view in almost all points.
Andy Müller-Maguhn
By Anne Roth, guest-blogging for the CCC
(English version below)
Liebe Hacker,
wie Ihr sicher gemerkt habt, ist die Situation an den Kassen unübersichtlich und davon geprägt, möglichst fair so vielen Hackern wie möglich die Teilnahme am Kongress zu ermöglichen. Wir sind dabei von den physikalischen Gegebenheiten des Gebäudes eingeschränkt und müssen – sehr zu unserem Leidwesen – Besucher wegschicken.
Dabei kommt es im Einzelfall zu unschönen Erlebnissen, die wir nun durch eine kurzfristige Maßnahme zumindest finanziell auszugleichen versuchen. Von den 300 am Mittwoch ab 08:00 Uhr an der Kasse zur Verfügung stehenden Tagestickets, werden wir, auf first-come-first-serve-Basis, an diejenigen eins kostenlos und nicht übertragbar verteilen, die bereits mindestens ein beliebiges Tagesbändchen fest am Arm haben. Alle anderen können ein Tagesbändchen regulär kaufen.
Dear fellow hackers,
as you may have noticed, the situation at the cassier decks is very confusing. We’re trying to allow as many hackers to attend 26C3 and do so in a way that’s as fair as possible. Still we’re bound to the actual physical capacity of the bcc building and were forced to send away participants.
Some of you have had a very unsatisfying experience due to this so we’ll try to compensate – at least financially – by the following measure: Out of the 300 daily tickets for wednesday, available on a first-come-first-serve-basis from 8 am on, we will give out a free and non-transferable one to everyone showing up with at least one day pass (wristband for day 1 – 3) still attached to his arm. All others still can buy a regular day pass for day four.
Berliner Congress Center
Update: more reports are popping up in blogs. Since most people publish more than one article, I’ll just name the blogs that have the details (please add more in the comments): Qbi, Open Data Network, Netzpolitik, Brainweich, Manu bloggt, Testgebiet Unintendet Purpose, Adrians Blog. More 26c3 feeds are at http://26c3.screamorap.org/. A video of a singing Tesla coil can be seen at Evil Daystar! “Verkabelt” have published their views on the first day as an audio podcast (in German).
The talks in the big halls are drawing a lot of attention, but many exciting things are taking place also in the basement and in workshop rooms. The Congess Radio is recording interviews. Several phone options are set up specifically for the four days: the Phone Operating Centre is running a mobile DECT system and phone infrastucture. In addition there is a cellular phone network, set up and operated including the necessary license to make phone calls within the 26c3 mobile and DECT networks. Find the mobile phone operators in Room C04 if you have questions.
Many workshops offer topics such as Podcasting Developer Workshop, Meditation for hackers or Haecksen breakfast (the women’s network within the CCC). Projects meet and present their work, in addition during the Lightning Talks new ideas and projects have four minutes to give an overview of what they’re doing and – more important – what kind of support they’re looking for.
By Anne Roth, guest-blogging for CCC
As you may have already heard, the 26C3 is sold out. There are no more all-day tickets available, and we have just sold out of day tickets for today (Day 2).
Day tickets for Day 3 will go on sale tomorrow morning at 08:00.
If you do not have a ticket, check out the live streams of the talks, or attend one of the many Dragons Everywhere gatherings being held all over the world!
We have activated our feedback system. So if you have attended a lecture, please look it up in the schedule (Fahrplan) and rate it. Your feedback is most helpful in determining what you like and what you don’t. It will help our speakers and the next program planning team to come up with an even more fascinating program. Thank you very much!