The 24th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, Germany
FULL STEAM AHEAD
In late December, cable docks, soldering stations, templates, 4,000 participants, and 100 talks were active ingredients in the 24th Chaos Computer Congress.
Out of 100 events, the “Hacking” track was best represented with about 35 talks, with the “Society” track following close behind (Figure 1). Roger Dingledine talked about the Tor project and the increasingly urgent need for an interface between technology and society. Dingledine said, “We need more lawyers looking into data protection” [1].
The Congress is continuing to move in the direction of more political and social topics. Despite this, there were still a number of interesting technical demonstrations. For example, the animated Mitch Altman, inventor of the open source TV-B-Gone remote control, shared his enthusiam at his talk and workshop on microcontroller hacking [2]. Several contributions clearly showed that vendors who block gaming consoles for alternative operating systems actually motivate open source developers.