mlcastle (a blog)

25C3 Wrapup

I recently attended the 25th annual Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin, Germany. It’s always exciting to attend these events and get an international perspective on how the world is unfolding.

Content

One of the most exciting things for me is to see the influence that the CCC (and its allies: FoeBud, FFFI, etc.) are able to have on the German and European political scenes with respect to privacy and data protection issues. This isn’t to say that they always (or even often) win: data retention laws are in full effect, some folks from Wikileaks reminded us that the safest countries for journalists are the USA and Sweden, and so on. But at least the CCC has enough respect to be able to offer its opinions and can even be said to lose—which of course is the first step towards winning. And, at a minimum, they have clever propaganda:

Perhaps the biggest security news of the conference was a demonstration that MD5 is completely useless for security. This is perhaps unsurprising (the writing has been on the wall for a few years now), but it’ll be interesting to see how long it takes to get rid of MD5 in all security-critical operations.

One trend which has been apparent of late is a resurgent interest in hardware: people are building all kinds of neat things out of electronics, and they are learning how to make things in all kinds of new and creative ways.

Community

The influence of the conference on building a global “hacker” community continues to grow: a truly international crowd attended the event. For the first time, some of the German-language events were translated into English, making them accessible to non-German-speakers. The hacker spaces movement was in full presence. And, of course, there were a number of parties at the c-base.

A Happy New Year to all, and I’ll see you at HAR2009 this August!