English

The first talk I watched today was about Terminator Genes and, as the speakers called it, biological restriction management. An important subject to come up that should be looked at, I suggest reading this telepolis-article about the subject.
Terminator genes are techniques in producing genetically modified organisms that can't reproduce themself to forbit »illegal« reproduction of them (that's why they used the analogy »biological restriction management«).

I just watched a talk about The very early Computer Game History. What I found interesting that some of the games that were implemented on the very first computers were the same that I used to implement when I started coding (e. g. Tic Tac Toe).

I also bought an RFID stopping metal case from the FoeBUD shop to store my student pass in it. It's probably really time to do such things and protect from surveillance threats.

Second day, finally uploaded some pictures and just found some time to blog between two talks.

Yesterday the We lost the war talk. Maybe I'll write something more in german when I find time for it. In short: IMHO this was an obscure mixture of political nonsense. This should at least be clear when reading the article with similar content in the last »Datenschleuder«, where the author claims something like »till 9.11. hackers ruled the world and everything was good« (to cite, »The big corporations were at our merce, because we knew what the future would look like and we had the technology to built it).
Lars wrote very drastically about it.

Today, the first interesting talk was5 Thesis on Informational-Cognitive Capitalism. I think I didn't really get what the autor wanted to say (surely related to missing sleep and lack of motivation to listen to english), but he was at least quite entertaining.

Next was Hashing Trusted Computing by Rüdiger Weis, as always quite funny, Rüdiger maybe should become the first professional math comedian. The content is obvious, at least for regular readers of my blog: Trusted Computing is evil and SHA1 is broken.

There was a nice presentation by fukami and Markus Beckedahl about the Sony BMG rootkit. They presented a lot of information, Markus has also collected it in his blog.

Next one was Technological art off the trodden tracks by two media artists that presented art which is related to hacking subjects and suggested that media artists and hackers come more together to share thoughts and projects. I hope they'll put their materials online, they had a lot of videos from nice stuff.

Just came from Learning cryptography through handcyphers by Benno de Winter. It was a basic introduction to some simple algorithms, not really new to me, but the speaker was worth watching because of the fun factor.

More to come.

One of the first talk I watched was Grey Commons by the swedish Group Piratbyrån.
They're a very sympatic organization completely opposed to copyright. That's a view I often miss in the discussions about »Intellectual property«. Protests are often limited to specific cases or copyrights getting more restrictive (like DMCA, software patents etc.), but nearly nobody questions if »IP rights« are of any use at all for the society.

The guys had a lot of good thoughts and especially criticized »low level« opposition like finding »alternatives to copyright«. I could agree very much with their arguments and I hope that their more radical views are taken up by people in other countries.

Just arirved at the 22th chaos communication congress. Together with Lars I took the Nachtzug from Augsburg.

We are in a very nice hostel called Generator Hostel, which is very nice for a quite moderate price. Although we arrived at 8 o'clock in the morning, we already could enter our rooms and get a breakfast on arrival day. Very recommendable.

Pictures will follow from time to time.

Yesterday del.icio.us, the well known social bookmark service, has been bought by Yahoo. This brings me to share some thoughts I had recently about the thing that everyone calls »Web 2.0«.
Although probably nobody can provide an exact definition on what Web 2.0 is, it's mostly surrounding »social software«, i. e. web-software that is not organized as top-down-communication, but as communication between the users.
The most common example for social software are probably wikis and blogs. What I always saw very critical is that centralized services like flickr and del.icio.us are so popular in the blogosphere and the internet community. They are often called »Web 2.0« as well, although they work completely different. My vision of a free net is a different one.

Now with yahoo buying del.icio.us, the two probably most popular »Web 2.0«-services belong to the same company. The problems with this are obvious: You don't know what Yahoo does with your data (Data Mining), you never know if they're gonna change their terms of use from one day to the other (e. g. limit the number of pictures/links, take money for services that were free before) or even shut down a service because it doesn't match the »shareholder value« (Remember GiMiX? That was social software as well).

In my opinion there is a big discrepance between the ideals of »social software« and letting it depend on one centralized service. I have no problem with hosters that provide free/ad-financed blogs. As long as I can trackback them with my self-hosted blog-software, as long as they can link me and as long as I don't need an account at some companies service to comment them. With flickr, this is different. I cannot add pictures on someone else's flickr-group from my own web-gallery. All the »social« aspect of flickr are completely based on everyone having an account at yahoo. Same goes with del.icio.us.

If we really want »Web 2.0« to be something that has to do with more freedom, more control from us / the users / the single person on the net, we should provide alternatives to centralized services. Alternatives that are not based on »just another web-service«, but on decentralized open standards and (at least as a possibility) free software. A fine example how this works is jabber (as an alternative to the IM-chaos of ICQ/AIM/MSN).
An alternative to del.icio.us could work like the PGP-keyservers. An alternative to flickr would be interoperability-standards to the various web-galleries (coppermine, menalto gallery), maybe some function similar to trackbacks for collective albums. If that's the direction »Web 2.0« goes, I'm really looking foward to »Web 3.0«. If »Web 2.0« means monopolies of Yahoo, Google and Microsoft, then it's not »MyWeb 2.0«.