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Comment by UltimateEdge | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why the Congress takes place during the last few days of December. There aren't many travel options if you want to get back to your country before the new year.

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It's traditionally and still a very DACH dominated event, for better or worse. Travel by regional/interregional trains around this time is perfectly fine, and it's a time where it's quite easy for a whole big community to synchronize for taking vacation.

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.

It’s a good chance to use your Bildungsurlaub allowance (education vacation?) where for 5 days a year you are being paid by your employer for educating yourself in a way of your choosing. C3 is recognized for that program almost everywhere in Germany.

("DACH" meaning Deutschland, Austria, Chwitzerland, if I'm not mistaken; i.e. the main German-speaking region. Not sure this is common knowledge outside of people that are in / regularly deal with DACH; I only learned of it 2 years after moving to Germany, being from the Netherlands.)

Confoederatio Helvetica – hence the ISO 3166-1 code CH.

Really cool people call it CHAD though. :P

As somebody else already said, it's perfect for the DACH region. Many companies close "between the years" (the 7 days between Christmas Eve and New Years) or run on a bare minimum staff.

It's easy for most people to take time off then and visit the congress.

CCC often reveals new software vulnerabilities. I don't know if it's deliberate, but if they reveal those vulnerabilities at Christmas, they ruin the holiday of whoever is responsible for fixing them - quite likely someone working for a big corporation.

Or "ruining someone's holiday" is a secondary effect. Simplest explanation is that it's easy to get vacation time from your "normal" job at that time compared to other times, so if you want to make sure as many people can make it as possible, those dates are likely to be the best.

Except most people that would like to go have family commitments around this time. And airports are really busy.

I've never been due to the busy and costly flights thing myself.

Where were you trying to travel from? Last time I was at the congress, most people I talked to arrived by train, myself included, even if it took a day of traveling.

I'm Dutch but I live in Spain now so by train is not really viable.

People associated with the CCC most often do responsible disclosure. Therefore you can expect vulnerabilities revealed during C3 to be already known in advance to the vendor. AFAIK an exception to that are jail breaks, which have quite a history of getting announced during C3 without disclosing them to the vendor first.

Always assumed it was because no-one else wanted the conference centre at that time of year, so it was cheap.

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