Hello Readers,
The rocket landed in Hamburg again 🙂 !
I’ve attended the last Chaos Communication Congress in December and need to say thank you to the organizers of the congress who did a really awesome job (again) on bringing together geeks, freaks, hackers and activists of all kind!
Another thanks go directly to my team of the @Internetwache for our nice, first meeting – you guys are cool – have I ever mentioned this 😉 ?
So, I do not want to describe every talk I’ve listened to, because there were a lot of interesting talks and the video of each talk is available here for free. I just want to outline two of the most interesting ones – well at least those who inspired me most, but at first some very few words about the main topic of this Congress.
The NSA and their world-domination idea
The whole Congress was dominated by one topic: The NSA and their shameless surveillance paranoia. Edward Snowden who risks his life for revealing the secret tampering of the NSA, is the person we all benefit from! He shows us how the NSA tries to infiltrate the whole world and their technologies to create a transparent society for their own purpose. This has absolutely nothing to do with terrorism anymore, if each and every citizen of this world is considered harmful by default. Now one might think about comparing the NSA (or the United States at all) with some of the most repressive regimes of the world, who are doing surveillance things too – so where’s the deviding line here? It gets really squishy at this point.
Now…as I am a German, who describes himself as a privacy enthusiast, asked my self: WTF? Our government has to take appropriate steps to push back the NSA – let’s say by granting Edward Snowden asylum. But sadly, as this won’t happen, and the NSA is as well granted to build new, additional buildings in Germany, we as citizens need to take our own appropriate steps:
- Do not trust any Cloud-Services, you didn’t build yourself: Go for your owncloud.
- Do not trust any E-Mail-Services, you didn’t build yourself: Go for Postfix, Exim etc. (Side-Note: Completely forget about this DE-Mail crap)
- Encrypt your communication wherever and whenever you can. Try PGP and OTR.
- Anonymize your communication as far as it’s possible: Go for TOR.
During the event Edward Snowden was awarded with the Balls-of-Steel award by FeFe, and Glenn Greenwald, the closest journalist to Snowden, was awarded with standing ovations for his impressive Keynote on the #30C3 about their upcoming releases.
But enough about this, otherwise I would write a new book here 😉
The most interesting talk!
“Hardware Attacks, Advanced ARM Exploitation and Android“. Stephen Ridley, a BlackHat trainer, gave a small introduction to this quite interesting topic since most of the today’s embedded devices are running ARM! Hack’em all 😉 
The most funny talk!
OK, well this wasn’t that easy to choose. Last year Natalie Silvanovich presented some hacks on Tamagotchis. This year she talked about her actual findings and demonstrated some really funny exploits during her talk “Even More Tamagotchis were harmed in the making of this Presentation“!
Yeah – I’m really looking forward to the #31C3!!!