Another year, another Chaos Communication Congress.
First thought going out: I missed so much stuff. Not just lectures, but also workshops, hacker groups, toys and other cool hacks. I didn’t even make it to the 30c3 Lounge until the third day of congress. There were halls I hadn’t entered even after five days on site.
Second thought: Wow. That was pretty incredible. Mostly thanks to our amazing team of translators who did a fantastic job again, translating all German talks into English and quite a number of English talks into German, even when talks were rescheduled with short notice or just appeared in the Fahrplan at 9am in the morning! This year, the translations were even widely known and announced before the session! Many thanks also to the VOC team who made the entire thing possible, routing signals here and there, providing different language streams, and getting the translated audio into the phone network; thanks to POC who provided the phone infrastructure and the group call number; thanks to the NOC for the 100Gbit/s network uplink (that is probably more than most residential internet connections in Hamburg, combined); thanks to the content team and the heralds for putting us in touch with speakers and for announcing the translations, and of course thanks to everybody listening to our live interpretation and giving us valuable feedback via Twitter, mail, phone or even in person. Much love, y’all!
And now it’s over for another year. I left the afterparty in the lounge at around 8am, and I’m writing this in the early afternoon. I haven’t slept in a while, but I feel great. And I will need to watch so many of the recordings that the streaming team is already putting online. Also, there were a number of new revelations at or during congress which are now making waves in the public sphere. Watching the responses in media and politics will be very interesting. There’s a lot of bad actors out there and almost all of the paranoia turned out to have been appropriate, but there’s also a strong community of hackers fighting for the good cause and not falling for corporate sponsorship or promises of “lawful” surveillance.
Very congress. So amaze. Much love. Wow.