CCC Day 1: It's Good To Be Back

Nothing beats a good hacker conference. The CCC(Chaos Communication Congress) has been taking place every year since 1984 and is one of the most important events in the hacker calendar. 150 talks, 3000 hackers, computers, phones and phun.

"Private Investigations Keynote speech"
Joi Ito used his keynote speech to assert that democracy is broken but that there is still lots that can be done to improve things in the world. Ito is a member of several important international committees so he tends to say stuff like that...

"Understanding Buffer Overflow Exploitation"
A standard talk on the consequences of slack coding on VN architecture. Nothing special.

"Hopalong Casualty"
This talk covered ways of getting video surveillance systems to recognise varios types of activity, using weak artificial intelligence. There are several talks on machine learning, fuzzing, and other AI-related stuff at the CCC this year. Usually I'd say it's something that interests me greatly, it was, in fact, a big part of my life when I was younger, but with something practical like CCTV it seems silly to focus on what's interesting instead of what works.

"Hacking CCTV"
Fuck. Trapped in a German lecture. I had though that this talk would be in English because the description of it in the CCC programme was in English. Fuck.

"Hacking Data Retention"
A good overview of data retention but not much that isn't obvious.

"Bad Trips"
A decent talk on how the WTO fuck people over through the use of trade regulations to assert Intellectual Property rights.

"We Lost The War"
This will be the defining talk of the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress. Rop and Frank said a lot of things that people didn't want to hear, let alone believe. The talk mainly covered the emergence of the surveillance society and the technology behind it. My favourite quote from the talk: "We need to build crypto and we need to build it fast".