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The Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) is an annual four-day technology/security conference featuring a variety of workshops and talks on topics like Computer Science in North Korea, hacking Iridium Pagers, the Internet of Toilets and EFI Bootkits for Apple Macbooks. CCC is in its 31st year (so this year’s event is 31C3) and I’ve wanted to go for the last few years. The problem is: CCC is in Germany and the timing isn’t ideal for those of us who need to make the trek over from America – 31C3 was from December 27 – 30 this year and nothing says “Happy Holidays” quite like asking your friends/loved ones for a ride to the airport at 4am on December 26th…and then again on the trip back on December 31st. That said, I redeemed some frequent flyer miles and hotel points (remember what I said about loyalty not too long ago?) and took a personal trip to Hamburg to attend 31C3 – and it was totally worth it. Here’s what I learned.

My journey to 31C3 started at SFO at 6am – I couldn’t find a direct flight into Hamburg, so my routing was SFO -> EWR -> HAM. At the United Club in SFO, I happened to meet another conference attendee, @jetdillo – I took a guess and asked if he was headed to Congress after spotting the GNU sticker on his luggage. Turns out we had the exact same routing to Hamburg so we agreed to meet up at the lounges en route and then at 31C3. After a 3-hour layover and shower in Newark, an uneventful flight across the ocean and a very brief, single-question encounter with customs in Hamburg, jetdillo and I hailed a taxi to the Park Hyatt Hamburg – home base for me for the next 4 nights.


Although the Park Hyatt isn’t quite as close to the Congress Center Hamburg (CCH) as some other hotels are, I chose it for proximity to the Hamburg Hauptbanhoff – the central train station. The CCH is at the Dammtor station, which is just one stop away from Hamburg Hbf and the ride is less than 10 minutes long, with trains arriving every 4 minutes. jetdillo is something of a CCC veteran, and was kind enough to give me a tour of the train station and assist me with the purchase of a Hamburg Card (the kiosks are NOT in English) after we snacked on some breakfast pastries from a nearby Dat Backhus. Afterwards, we went our separate ways and agreed to meet later that evening for the midnight screening of Citizenfour with director Laura Poitras (I highly recommend the film).


Hamburg’s Congress Center is huge and sprawling, and the 4-floor layout is somewhat labyrinthine. There was a lot to take in after checking in and collecting my 31C3 wristband. There is something for almost every type of geek at 31C3. Into coffee? There’s an entire section dedicated to rare and unusual coffee. Collector of geeky stickers like I am? There is a sticker exchange bin that was overflowing with swag from Tor, FSFE, and BitTorrent Sync (*winks*). Hardware/software guy? The assembly area had soldering irons aplenty in case you wanted to reball your PS3, 3D printers, huge bandwidth (outgoing bandwidth up to 11 GiB/s), and more. Physical security enthusiast? The lockpicking assembly area was huge. There was even a “food hacking” area for the “foodies” of the world. I settled on a quick meet & greet with bunnie and xobs of Novena fame where I got to pester them about when my very own Novena desktop would be shipping, FPGAs, 3rd party battery options for the Novena and the oddities that can be found and purchased in Shenzhen.


Onto the serious stuff: I wanted to experience 31C3 to get a better idea of how Europeans felt about privacy and security in this day and age. In many of the talks I’ve given on Sync and the importance of safeguarding your data and protecting your privacy, I’ve encountered audiences where close to 50% felt that digital surveillance was okay and didn’t affect them since they “weren’t doing anything illegal.” Germany has a pretty solid Sync user base and the Germans seem to take their privacy very seriously (the rules/reminders around taking photos at 31C3 were much more strictly enforced vs at US conferences) – the general consensus I reached from talking with a variety of attendees from a number of European nations was that privacy and security are very important — everyone is affected and everyone should care…and if you don’t, well…I don’t speak German, but I can usually figure it out when people are expressing dissatisfaction or distaste by their inflection and certain universal hand gestures. In addition, almost everyone I spoke to about the Sync API fully grasped the importance of peer-to-peer and decentralised applications


A lot of big stories broke first at 31C3 and are slowly starting to trickle into mainstream tech news outlets – the latest example being Thunderstrike – the first reported OS X EFI bootkit as reported by Ars Technica just yesterday. I had the pleasure of attending this talk after braving the weather on a teeth-chatteringly cold morning on December 29th. The video of the talk is available on the 31C3 media page if you are interested in learning about how your MacBook can be pwned.

Possibly the biggest story to break (in my opinion, at least) came during Jacob Appelbaum & Laura Poitras’ talk “Reconstructing Narratives.” During this talk, it was revealed that tools like Ian Goldberg’s OTR and GPG - when set up and used properly – are very effective against surveillance. Awesome.

Some other talks I enjoyed (in no particular order) include, “Forging the USB Armory,” the “31C3 Infrastructure Review” (for those like me who are curious about how the network at 31C3 was set up, “SS7Map,” and “Beyond PNR: Exploring Airline Systems.” Richard Stallman‘s “Freedom in Your Computer and in the Net” was also fun.

I get it — sitting in talks all day long probably isn’t everyone’s bottle of Mate. There are other uniquely geeky and awesome things to do at Congress – I went on a hackertours tour of DESY – the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron – where I got to check out (and stand next to) a particle accelerator and look foolish contorting my arm in weird ways to figure out torque vector direction using the Right-hand rule - just like during exams in university Physics.


To wrap things up, the message and theme at 31C3 resonated strongly with what I preach on behalf of Sync and what BitTorrent stands for as a company: your data belongs to you – protect and safeguard it. It’s up to all of us take our own privacy and security seriously.

Oh and, the “bottle of Mate” reference and photo from above? Club Mate seems to be the official beverage of CCC – its slogan is, “Man gewöhnt sich daran” – German for, “You’ll get used to it” – a slogan that I hope doesn’t apply to the trend of increased surveillance and how we feel about diminishing privacy with today’s Internet.

Source : http://blog.bittorrent.com/2015/01/0...urity-at-31c3/