Four exciting days at the 37C3 have come to an end, and it’s time to look back on some of the interesting things I saw and learned. The Chaos Computer Club usually hosts a convention every year, but this year was special because it was the first in-person convention after the COVID pandemic, and it took place in the newly renovated Congress Center Hamburg.

rocket

This is my first time at the congress, after many years of wanting to go, I finally made it wuhuu! Let’s start with the fact that it’s an overwhelming experience, I haven’t had so many new impressions and exciting things happening in such a short time in a long time. For me, the congress felt like a mix between a conference and a festival, the many gatherings and open spaces filled with everything you can imagine, plus the curated talks and self-organized session that left a lasting impression on me and allowed me to learn a lot, so here I want to share some of the talks I listened to. This is a random collection and there was/is still much more to explore, but this might give you some inspiration to start with.

castle

First up is: “Cosmic Connectivity - Starlink, Satellite Swarms and the Hackers’ Final Frontier” - this talk was about LEO satellites that provide connectivity services like Starlink, besides the facts about the constellation of these small satellites, how they are stacked in multiple layers and the rockets used to transport them, the economic aspects were especially interesting. The presenter talked about the huge growth and valuation of Starlink and the huge gap for payload transportation as sending satellites into space becomes more popular. I guess this will make someone even richer if other companies don’t accelerate their development of rockets and space services.

Next I would like to mention the Science Slam on day 2 which was about saving the world with science if people listened to science, the talk contained a lot of memes and its best to see for yourself.

The NGO behind Tor gave an interesting technical talk about Tor, Tor censorship, and how they circumvent it in Russia, Iran, and Turkmenistan. The talk was also a bit amusing as the audience got a glimpse into the Russian censorship department, which apparently works with Excel lists to manually track and block Tor bridges.

Social Engineering, now more important than ever, find out how to protect yourself and your loved ones.

There was a lot to say about what happened in the last four years without a congress. Listen to some of the CCC people talk about it in the CCC Four Year Review.

Synthetic Sentience! The presenter spoke very fast and his topic is complex, it’s probably best if I don’t try to explain it and you watch it yourself! But in short, it is about AGI and very futuristic!

Perhaps my absolute favorite performance, the Heimlich Manover. A super interesting talk about your right to make inquiries to the German public administration and the incredible platform that has been built to help you do that: fragdenstaat.de. The talk also included many cases in connection to the platform.

Do you know what 4D cubes look like? Well, neither do I, but I got more confused and had a lot of fun with “Exploring hypercomputation with the effective topos”. I loved the thought experiment where you imagine a 2D world with 2D beings, one of them is in prison, and now you as a 3D being visit this world, pick up the 2D being and put it on the other side of the prison, it was pretty wild to say the least.. but certainly one of my favorites, and it is a shame that I was not able to see more of the “Wondrous Mathematics” series.

Last event I watched before my departure today was about the things you need to do to actually block your lost or stolen Girocard in Germany, you might think it is enough to call a number, but this talk revealed that you also need to go to the police to trigger the KUNO system, otherwise attackers might still be able to use your card with a signature.

What else? Well, I’m still catching up as there’s so much going on at the same time, but here are some ideas of things I’ll be watching the recordings of, some of which we couldn’t get into as the halls were completely full, so they must be promising!

On day 3, I loved the entertainment that took place at midnight that day: The Prompt Battle. In this battle, which was hosted by two awesome moderators who made it really fun to watch, the contestants had to enter prompts for DALLE to create the best image given a scenario. This was then judged by the audience, here is an example from last night.

prompt battle

Sadly this was not recorded and was only enjoyable in the moment and what better way to end this blog post if not by a DALLE 2 generated picture of my impression prompt of the congress this year.

37C3 DALLE

And with that, I’m calling it a year and I wish you a fantastic new year and hope to see you at 38C3!

This post may get some updates in the future- so come back later