Call for Participation to Chaos Computer Club’s 37C3
content.events.ccc.de
content.events.ccc.de
Besides not being a monolith and this being amenable to labeling as such, it's still in many parts different from many other hacker scenes.
The CCC has always had the ambition (and backing credentials/skills) to be a political movement as much as a technological one. In fact that's the origin story of the Congress; Wau Holland inviting others to "do something" with these machines that were set to change the world. This political attitude always had a left and anti-fascist bent, IMHO something that Germany in the 80s, and nowadays, desperately needs.
The US scene in comparison (seen from far, just to be clear) looks much more comfortable with closeness to corporate and state actors. Having worked with the intelligence community seems to be more of a badge of honor over there?
In France in comparison the scene as I see it focuses much more on making things, while organisations like La Quadrature du Net are well known but small and not at all organized/supported in the grass roots way that the CCC is. Which is why they seem to enjoy the CCC events, it's always great to have them there. :)
I might be getting this very wrong, like I said I'm only seeing the US scene from "over here" and I only have shallow interaction with the French scene.
I'd also love to hear from other places and how your local nerd communities do in terms of taking political agency.
Regarding the political bent, one big difference from the US is that people at CCC will openly express their disagreements, and are generally respectful about it. The only limitations are that Nazis are not allowed, which is partly because they are forbidden by law.
this is true, and it's one of the reasons I helped start cyberia.club and layerze.ro - US tech is deeply entwined with megacorps and it sucks the joy out of hacking, at least imho.
Sorry, but throwing someone on the floor in front of the congress building for registering clearly sarcastic domains such as "hitler.rocks" and "nuke.africa" is just not what I understand under anti-facism. It's merely a power move for confirming your own moral superiority. I mean, just look at the website, and you will clearly see that the whole site is meant as a joke.
If you want to be political, you shouldn't start with labelling someone as "fac|rac|sex-ist" because that implicitly means that it's the end of the discussion. That's not how politics should work. Paul Graham wrote a wonderful essay about this. [2]
I'm now just donating my ex-membership fee to my local Chaostreff, since I know what kind of person runs that place :)
You choose to ignore the anti-trans posters they hung up in the conference center.
This is news to me. Could you share more info about this? I did a quick google search and couldn't find anything.
They where an iteration of the "Birds doesn't exist..." posters which was a meme during that years CCC.
I would appreciate a citation as nobody has mentioned anti-trans posters.
What was mentioned is that there had been conflict the year before and that Vincent was told he wasn’t welcome, which was the root of the escalation.
cock.li, /g/, 4chan joint assembly printed and spammed these posters and their logo (you can see it in the OP post thumbnail) all around and were explicitly told not to organize an assembly on 36c3.
Regardless, Vincent Canfield decided to come to 36c3 and started conflicts somewhere around the Tor, GNUNet and some activist/political projects around there, then refused to get out when told to do so by orga and called the police.
From what I gather is that the conflict around the website started at 35C3 with the posters and the general shitposting. It was pinned to the cock.li assembly and vc was then asked to not come back. Which they did 36C3 and resulted in the above video.
Whether or not vc knew all of this, or was directly involved, I don't know.
I could take the argument you made in a parallel thread and say that people who feel upset at being labeled fascist or racist or sexist could just choose not to be offended. Why is the question of truth/falsity suddenly so important when it impacts them, whereas it's irrelevant when they wish to make satirical/ironic statements that may or may not impact others?
I'm not familiar with what happened there, but at least to me these domain names are definitely not "clearly sarcastic".
Have you taken a look at the website? [1] You should be able to detect that the site is satire within a few seconds.
Of course, we could dig up the whole “what is satire, what is x-ism” controversy up again, like after the Charlie Hebdo shooting. But I do believe that it's a joke, especially when looking at the context (what most people apparently don't do).
And before labelling someone as a fascist, that's undoubtedly the thing that you should do first: look at the context.
[1] https://cock.li/
No, I haven't, because the parent comment was referring to registering these domains, not about what they serve.
I also don't want to judge whether whatever happened at that C3 was justified, but rather that it's not clear from just domain names if there meant in a sarcastic way or not.
My point is here is that it's very easy to fall into a pattern of 'it's satire when I do it to you, but it's cancel culture* when you do it to me'. I don't think of (or even about) the cock.li admin as a fascist particularly, but I'd be very surprised if he wasn't fully aware that his domain is very popular with fascist trolls and used for quick and easy sockpuppet manufacture and has been for years. You could believe in the importance of making anonymous email widely accessible and keep doing that, without necessarily pandering to the worst of examples of the people who use your service.
* or whatever the equivalent moral outrage of the moment is.
I disagree with “it's satire when I do it to you, but it's cancel culture”. Yes, this statement gets often used by people who try to victimize themselves, but I don't think it's the case here. I can't find the words right now to express reasoning right now, but I'll come back later and revisit this post.
> but I'd be very surprised if he wasn't fully aware that his domain is very popular with fascist trolls and used for quick and easy sockpuppet manufacture and has been for years
Yes! I would be surprised too, if there weren't users who are coming from the right wing, but imo cock.li is actually a bad choice if you intend to harass someone online: The major social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Discord, Xenforo (customizable) and YouTube just straight up block all domains from cock.li from signing up because they have the same reputation as trash mails: They can be almost endlessly created without any major cost.
Besides that, the service also undeniably experienced abuse, like the bomb threat which was sent by some student to his school from madbomber@cock.li. But I think that's what happens when you mix young people (maybe social rejects?) + privacy. Same stuff as on 4chan.
Something else that made me wondering just at this moment: Reddit still does not require any kind of mail when signing up. This is quite surprising to me.
1) Disingenuously frame someone being removed from premises where they are not welcome as "decided that X is a fascist and started, escalated, and carried out an attack".
2) Care more about someone who runs services on "hitler.rocks", "nuke.africa" and "nigge.rs" than you care about CCC being kind and welcoming place for everyone - for example, people who might not want to be called "niggers".
3) Use "it's just joke bro" as a defense for despicable behavior.
I have no idea what someone like you was doing in CCC in the first place.
No, this is — to my best knowledge — what happened.
> 2) Care more about someone who runs services on "hitler.rocks", "nuke.africa" and "nigge.rs" than you care about CCC being kind and welcoming place for everyone - for example, people who might not want to be called "niggers".
No one is calling anyone like this. But I see that it's intentionally provoking through obscenity. However, it is not possible to determine the boundary between “obscene” and “non-obscene” according to factual characteristics, and everything about this is subjective:
For some people graffiti is obscene, for some people kissing in public is obscene, for some people name-calling is obscene, and some aren't concerned with whatever you do.
In fact, we can see this in this discussion: I see that the domain is using the TLD to break a taboo and to get attention, but I don't see an insult in this as it's not redirected at anyone harmfully. It's all up to the reader's interpretation.
> 3) Use "it's just joke bro" as a defense for despicable behavior.
I would agree with you, if he would actually make differences between race or sex. But he doesn't.
In the end it's just a vanity domain, which to me is funny for the reason that so many people get hung up on it, which is most likely the desired effect.
As far as I understand, he showed up to Congress and did a Hitlergrüße (Nazi salute) to their security. In Germany that is illegal and arrestable, so he should actually be grateful they only kicked him out and did not call the police. Germany has very strict laws against video-recording people without their consent, so creating this video would be considered another crime.
I can't speak for the content of the video itself, but I would imagine that most Germans would see "throwing someone on the floor" as a reasonable response to making the Hitlergrüße.
This is simply not true. Before the C3 took place, Michael required Vincent to remove all the unfunny stuff from his website to be able to register an assembly for C3. However, Vincent did not agree to this, so he didn't register an assembly.
Then, during C3 on the 27th Dec, Vincent sent out a tweet that he's on C3, and so he and a few users of his email service met informally, but not as a cock.li assembly. It wasn't a huge crowd, I think like 5 people(?).
Michael then approached Vincent and said, that he wouldn't be allowed on the premise. Vincent then offered to take it to the Arbitration Board, which was specifically set up for situations like this: When someone experiences sexism/racism or discrimination of any kind, they should take it to the AB, where the awareness team tries to find a mutually agreeable solution. Michael didn't like this proposal and just told him to leave within the next 5 Minutes.
Apparently the short-haired girl, which was following Michael, did not want to wait 5 Minutes. That's when Vincent sent an audio recording to himself and switched to video recording. That's what you see in the first post I made.
The phone which Vincent used for recording was seized by security. However, confiscating cameras or camera phones is the sole responsibility of the police or the bailiff. Stewards and security guards are not allowed to do that.
> Germany has very strict laws against video-recording people without their consent, so creating this video would be considered another crime.
This isn't true either. You are allowed to record if you have legitimate interests in recording the current event, e.g. when a friend gets knocked down to the floor by other people, as the others would be free to leave the scene if they really wanted to. However, you are not allowed to release the footage to a public forum without the consent of the party that displays the helplessness.
He tried to start shit and got thrown out. Stop whining.
i can’t think of a single bar, restaurant, etc in the world which won’t eject someone when they intentionally cause trouble. particularly if the person has been told they aren’t welcome.
why do some people struggle with this extremely basic rudimentary thing we teach every child—if youre annoying on purpose, people will treat you like you’re an annoying person.
just because some want to rename ‘be annoying’ to ‘trolling’ this doesn’t change the response you’re going to get.
again, this is super basic stuff. if you go out of your way to annoy someone, people get annoyed. very basic. it’s not shocking. it’s not scandalous. it’s basic behavior.
Not sure where that guy is from (and also dont want to judge the story at all),.. BUT there is not much like that here but one of the few and also by law forbidden taboos is this. With that, you are never clearly sarcastic, the opposite. No excuse, sorry.
For a long time, cock.li was hosted on Hetzner - until a bunch of bomb threats to schools in the US originated there. There was a fun little bit of government overreach involved too, since the german police seized the server twice - the first time they only took a single drive (probably as advised by Hetzner staff), and then, a week later, they demanded the entire server. It's pretty much implied that this was at the behest of US authorities, since a related FOIA request at the german feds was denied with "may cause adverse affects on international relations"
And his use of slurs is by no means ironic, unless you want to claim he is ironic 100% of the time he is online.
When I visit the page I'm greeted by a banner with fake quotes, here is a selection:
> I'm 200% n*ger
> Come fuck with a n*ger. I'm a business man
There is nothing that indicates sarcasm or satire there when it comes to all those choices, given that the site advertises itself towards 4chan users. At best it's edgy and infantile, at worst it's just the usual racist shit that is "funny" only to the people repeating it very loudly over and over and over.
Weird how the only flavour of "sarcasm" and "humor" people like you and the site owner can come up with is the glorification of nazis and making fun of black people.
I wonder who it is you are trying to fool here...
Everyone who donates at least $5 can put a testimonial up there. I think it's pretty prominent, shown right below the donation button under bitcoin/monero logo on the donation page.
Anyway, it could also be that I'm emotionally dumbed down in this respect after spending years on the internet, but I don't feel offended by this at all. Do you feel offended enough to kick the admin on the floor?
Because the more I read from you, the more I believe that you are either severely mentally ill or just an enormous asshole. I don't care what it is, but fix yourself.
And to answer the question: That guy should be grateful that he left with all his teeth, cause secu doesn't mess around. That's how wrong you are, and none of your entitled whining will change that.
With every sentence you write you manage to make yourself look more like an oceanic garbage patch of a human being.
I feel sorry for you that you seem to be absolutely unable to reflect your own behavior.
It is a new form of writing, though. Satire, today, is thought of as something that is known to be false, while trolling seems to be characterized by a sort of "stochastic truth" where the author is purposely ambiguous about whether they believe it or not. It lets the author of a piece of trolling say things that are clearly over the line, and mean it. It lets the author walk back the statements if they are unpopular and lean in if they are popular.
I do wonder if original pieces of satire and parody from hundreds of years ago were written with the intention of the same ambiguity of truth.
The problem with 4chan political trolling is that they always use the same fucking joke and there's no underlying satire to pick up upon. "Here's some people who don't fit in to the default social mold, now laugh and mock." This isn't satire, there's no rhetorical prank. This is just pissing in an ocean of piss. Even treating the board as a whole performative art piece is just running the OneJoke recursively against a large swath of probably-white, possibly-poor, definitely autistic people.
There is no ambiguity of truth. The people who treated /pol/ as satire up and left decades ago. The only people who remain are true believers interested in hurting people, including themselves.
[0] Also known as "eating The Onion"
Also, Wikipedia says 4chan launched in 2003. 19 years ago. Which I doesn’t count as decades.
…waaait a minute… has my autism just eaten your onion? Layers upon layers to this satire thing haha
The scene around CCC is not like that. If you challenge some thinking there, people will feel threatened and will start looking for reasons to have you removed. The escalation with VC was another iteration of that, but not the first i witnessed.
Some Erfa's are still good, but my local one isn't, and after 34C3, i think the congress isn't, either. The CrewCrew secret police thing is still creeping me out.
Not sure in what kind of fantasy world you live in, but get help. Maybe lay off your "supplements" for a bit.
I too love a good talk on (e.x exploit research) and longingly wonder if in part due to attempts of censorship by companies, also the value of exploits if the 'glory times' of such presentations are over. Ultimately I respect the CCC for providing a platform to discuss difficult problems adjacent to technology as well.
Finally, the perfect forum to deliver my perspective of ML and AI current state of music and the outlook for the next 1, 3, and 5 years. There will be a lot of hurt feelings. It will be very constructive however and show the roadmap between artists and engineers that is yet to develop in earnest and can potentially be the next largest US cultural export.
To use a simile, the current level of ML/AI music is about on par with a precocious elementary student with a basic understanding of an Akai MPC. That’s why you can listen to 1,000 of them and maybe one resembles a not-bad song. Not bad is not good mind you. It just means it’s not physically offensive / unlistenable to humans.
One of the hardest lessons for non-creative people to learn about the how of what I do need to understand creativity is inherently rule breaking. Derivative art - like that hack warhol’s Prince portrait- have a limited impact overall. Coming back from crazy town with a handful of cool images nobody has seen before like Dali? Now we’re talking!
There is hope in the sector, but unfortunately for the tech realm, you’re doomed unless you reconfigure your development approach to have 60% of the brain pathways look like spaghetti designed by a coked up ambitious chimp with Visio. I’ll have to dig it up but I heard guitar sales in the US increased during the pandemic…same basic design since the log.
not really true. As far as seven(!) years back people have done experiments where AI reproduction was good enough to fool even experienced listeners (https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/computer-generates-m...)
The biggest issue with AI art isn't the quality, we can already make generative art that is faithful enough to not be distinguishable. It's that authorship is an inherent part of art, and nobody is really interested in art that has no human creator in the same way nobody watches bots play chess, despite higher quality of play. Authenticity is central to art, what Walter Benjamin called the 'aura' of a work. (it's unique place in space and time, which automated art does not have).
Keeping this in mind the NFT craze over seemingly random pictures makes more sense, because it was essentially a mechanism to give a replaceable, fungible, mechanic work an aura of sorts, anchoring it. Rather than fidelity, this will be the central question of the tech/art intersection.
Uhhmm…
If you have an OpenAI account, try getting GPT-3 to write a short murder mystery, for example. GPT-3 is kinda good at dyadic and triadic interactions and even some kinds of story generation, but doesn't get the structural requirement of multiplying contradictions until a tipping point resulting in convergence (though I think LLMs can be taught that).
Remember that this is not the type of Congress where people go on paid time. There are no sponsorships and generally no commercial interest behind this event, so I think (my guess, I have no data to back that up) that most people take vacation days and pay their own ticket.
I've never been due to the busy and costly flights thing myself.
It's easy for most people to take time off then and visit the congress.
https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2022/37-chaos-communication-co...
Here are two blog post on suggestions for researching and submitting security conference proposals:
https://medium.com/katies-five-cents/writing-infosec-confere...
https://sroberts.medium.com/building-better-security-present...
Looking for them myself, found to guides to research and submitting proposals which I added to the original request for examples; neither though appear to provide actual submission examples.
The CfP is handled by people who are able to tell apart a bullshit talk with a well-written proposal from a good talk with a proposal written by someone inexperienced. :)
(Also swear I have seen something like blog post that showed this before, but unable to find it.)
I mean, cryptography is at the core of it.
There's multiple levels of organization, grouped under the various *OCs (Foo Operations Center), the best place to get to know them and get involved is at the congress through angel shifts. The second best place is probably to hang out in the various German/Swiss/Austrian hackerspaces during the year and getting to know people who are part of the orga.
No.
So whatever weird prejudice you seem to showcase here, maybe it is worth considering to get over yourself for something that interests... hackers. It is a hacker conference after all, and believe it or not technology also intersects with social sciences in interesting ways.
I bet the same people running this whole thing are also very well paid techies. Not sure about the volunteers though.
And third, not last, the fact something is run by volunteers does not change it’s nature - it is still a business thing. Some expenses are paid for and eventually all the subcontractors are paid while the volunteers are not. Not fair at all.
The whole thing is purposefully built like that. There is 0 interest in having people on stage that do it for the money. Instead it is about people that deeply care about a topic and want to share knowledge, ideas etc with others.
It is not a regular IT conference. It is not a business thing.
I'm not convinced of your last line. A business is typically maximizing profit, which isn't what's happening here to my knowledge.
Food stalls are not hired by the CCCV GmbH, they pay to be there (and in turn get to dictate their prices), video streaming and such is handled by FEM e.V. (a non-profit that specializes in this kinda stuff) and is not paid (except for expenses, I think, but I don't have insights into that part of the finances) and truck drivers and such are actually volunteers.
"The people running this thing" are also volunteers. They do get a bit of money as an exchange for having to take unpaid vacations way in advance of the event for organizing stuff, but it's a far cry from "well paid". It's more of a "here's enough to not go broke on rent and food".
Everyone involved is a volunteer, or at the very most making significantly less money than they could running events of a similar scale in the real world, and they’re all doing it because there’s not really anything quite like these events outside of them. There’s a distinctly anarchic feeling to them, with a great many things that just organically happen because someone thought it would be fun, and then it got totally out of hand because other people latched on to it as well. The Chaos Post is a prime example of this, a postal service which is effectively a bunch of nerds cosplaying a worldwide postal service - I’ve known of people who addressed postcards to themselves, but at a future event on another continent, and they got delivered intact.
It is one thing to throw a party for 20friends and another to have FOSDEM sized gig. Such events are not presented in open ground in some forest by people shouting loud (been to such also, although for music). So they have cost - for venue, internet, electricity, screens, typically some food, drinks etc. As a presenter I have a cost for flight, accommodation, food, etc.
Someone pays the bill. Not for profit still has bills to pay. If you don’t pay deeds with cash, there’s some other value exchanged.
So why not support these people who contribute? What’s wrong with that, sorry I’m not getting it. Besides students very often participate by moving boxes between rooms, because for jobs that require responsible actions one needs an expert. Being a student I’d rather want to participate in something that actually teaches me something, but at the end the best I can hope for is to get to know some famous folks. But I can also do it as a visitor, right?
While I'm grateful to ccc organizers and understand that things are sometimes clearer and easier without the distorting effects of money...
I think defaulting to offering an honorarium to speakers is really healthy. The cultural baseline can easily be set to that any "financially comfortable" speakers donate it straight back without collecting, while only those who need it, keep it.
Why? Because speakers with many areas of expertise cannot afford to spend time speaking for free. Some really rad people can, but just saying that many cannot. And while it's maybe not a big deal if there's narrow representation of ppl volunteering at the ticket booth, there is a larger loss of possibility when cash-poor types of speakers can't afford to show up.
Speakers are the bringers of ideas, and who speaks affects the intellectual space that an event creates. And it might be said that creating that intellectual space is the main point of an event. The other motivation is maybe creating a new relational space, new relationships between people that tend to be fostered and grown around the feeding trough of presentation content.
So the "intellectual" is about "what gets broadcast" and "relational" is more about "who gets enticed to attend", and "which ideas fuck and make new ideas in the conversations between those attendees". All of the above flows from the speakers, and so I'd argue that it's more important to use the powerful magic of money to help certain speakers show up.
I think the sweet spot for starting to experiment with honoraria is: low enough to be a bit insulting to those who would be driven by the money, but high enough to meaningfully cover some costs for someone just trying to get by :)
Instead everyone is expected to contribute ideas (and even physically as a volunteers)
The talks are actually only a part of the whole things and the main track talks (for which this CFP is for I assume) are only a part of the talks (the rest are organized by assemblies)
It's very different to usual IT conf, even compared to FOSDEM.
(Not part of the orga, this is only my understanding as an attendee)
Paying the speakers would increase ticket prices (though not by much), create a "why do they get paid when everybody volunteers" effect that would discourage volunteers, and ultimately likely lower the quality of the conference.
They make pretty clear that if travel costs are really an issue, they'll find a solution.