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Comment by strictnein | Hacker News Reader

Disagree with your assessment that CCC is more well known than DEFCON. Maybe in Europe that's the case? DEFCON has 2x the attendees. This would be tough to fully figure out who's right, but just doesn't seem to be the case, imo.

Also, there's a lot more going on at DEFCON than just hacking. There's art, music, gatherings of all types, etc.

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Not to compare CCC and DEFCON, but there are quite a few "non-hacking" things going on at CCC. I was there last year and was surprised to see such a diverse background of attendees—ranging from humanities, arts, to hardcore hackers. In my personal experience I've never seen this kind of a diversity within one event.

Overall it was an amazing experience. Although, a little knowledge of German would have been helpful :)

Hm, maybe in USA DEFCON is more well known. I was aware while writing this that this is probably debatable (but I was disagreeing with the assessment that DEFCON is clearly the best known, as said in the article). (Also, I'm clearly seeing now that it is indeed very debatable, as the votes for this comment go up and down all the time.)

W.r.t. attendees, I am not sure. CCC has multiple events per year, and is also a club with many members. The biggest of their events it the CCC congress (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Communication_Congress) which has attendees in a similar order, maybe slightly less, but that is only one of multiple events.

I have heard from people attending both events (DEFCON and CCC) that CCC is much more diverse in topics and what's happening at the events.

> I have heard from people attending both events (DEFCON and CCC) that CCC is much more diverse in topics and what's happening at the events.

Yeah, I think the CCC events, at least recently, got very far into the mainstream and politics and strayed quite a bit from their roots, adding more and more that seemed intent of encouraging newcomers vs being interesting for those that have been involved longer. That's a valid direction, of course, but it feels less like a hacker convention and more like a general mainstream somewhat-tech-related convention, like re:publica with a few tech talks thrown in and set in december.

I was at the last CCC congress, and actually this was also debated there (i.e. what topics the CCC should cover, and how/whether that has changed). Actually some people said that it has become too diverse now. Some also claimed that it has become too political, but if you look back to the roots, it actually was always political. In any case, I think you cannot say that technical topics became too short. It just became bigger, and there is more of everything.

For me personally, the technical parts just fell off. Where defcon has the really interesting stuff, CCC has talks how you can send SMS with an RPI, an USB dongle and ready made software that are okay for a beginner's tutorial but that I find lacking for this kind of event. I've watched maybe a hand full of talks from the last CCC, but I always find myself running out of time instead of talks when I look at defcon (they've massively increased the amount of talks with the different villages lately), and the quality is much higher.

Back in the days, politics came into play where technology meets the real world and politics are involved, now it felt more like a party's youth organization's online-convention. But I gather that's what the majority of CCC members want, and it's fine by me, there's obviously a demand for that kind of event, they are quickly outgrowing their locations, it's just no longer anything I really care for.

I know both of these names, although I am always amazed every year how the media swarms DEFCON and there always seems to be a steady stream of news stories and articles about computer security and various hacking things for a week or two or so every year during and after DEFCON.

Every now and again the CCC is mentioned in a news story, but it seems like the US media loves to talk about the big hacker gathering in Vegas.

I live in Europe and I'd never even heard of CCC.

(Probably goes without saying, but I'm well aware of DEFCON and have been for 20 years, I know a handful of people who've been even).

CCC covers more society and political topics as well, beyond the topics mentioned above which CCC also had plenty of last time I went.

Regarding attendees, I am not sure - haven't been Defcon in a few years (mostly as it started being not so well organized), but went to CCC and that was gigantic in scale.

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