Hanno's blog

My favorite talk yesterday was done by Werner Pieper, which was mainly a collection of anecdotes about him being a former drug-dealer. He presented some interesting thoughts and experiences about trust in the illegal world. He also had some interesting stories about piracy-prints.

Today, I watched a talk about TPM and MacOS, which led to a very angry reply at the end by Rüdiger Weiss (who did a lot of work and interesting talks about trusted computing in the past years), sadly there wasn't any time left. Also about DRM, later this day there was a sadly very rarely visited talk by Seth Schoen from the EFF about television standards and the DRM-discussion in the DVB-group (DVB is the european digital video standard). Very detailed information, also many things I didn't know, for example that the industry plans to implement devices that only work in certain areas (by GPS-modules) or in a specific household. Most people seemed to have attended the talk by their »popstar« (Lawrence Lessig), who was placed in the same time slot.

Beside that, I sat some time at the CAcert-booth, helping them assuring visitors. Had some nice talks there and had the feeling that CAcert is really getting forward these days. For example I didn't know till now that Indymedia is using CAcert for their open posting.

Beside that, some people asked me about my desktop-background, it's from an anti-drm/itunes-campagne by the free software foundation and you can find it here.

Still here at the 23C3, I'll try to summarize some things about the talks I've visited yesterday.

First was a presentation about the Trust model of GPG/PGP and an alternative approach. I wasn't so impressed, because I think the main lack from the web-of-trust-infrastructure is that it's too complex to understand for the masses.

The Lightning-Talks were quite nice, some guy presented some live-hacks to a poorly designed travel agency, which was very funny. I personally presented compiz and told some short things about the situation of 3D-graphics and desktops.
I saw about the last 10 minutes of a talk about Drones, camera-supplied small devices flying around, and thoughts what these devices could mean for the society. A group is working on creating such devices on quite small costs. I'll have to fully view that on video after the congress.

Another very interesting Talk: »The gift of sharing«, the referent presented thoughts what kind of »economy-structure« the free software development should be called. It was a bit difficult to follow the talk, as it was in english and I'm no native english speaker. There's a paper from the guy which is probably worth reading.

The last talk was about wiki knowledge and citing that in science. The referents plan to create an RFC for citing-URLs in Wikis.
What irritated me was a computer science professor telling that she wouldn't allow her students to cite wikis, with the stupid argument they should cite their sources from books, completely igonring that science can happen in wikis and it may be the original source of the knowledge, not just something that has been explored elsewhere. Ruediger Weiss gave good arguments against that and mentioned that he thinks wiki is really a new kind of doing science and should be handled as such.

To be continued.

Kongress, der 23. Heute morgen angefangen, diesmal habe ich es geschafft, vor der langen Schlange anzukommen, was sich angesichts der Temperaturen als sehr vorteilhaft erwiesen hat.

Heute bereits einen Lightning-Talk mit einer kurzen Vorführung von compiz gehalten. Rest war auch recht nett.
More to come.

Die Weihnachts- und Silvestertage werde ich auf zwei Veranstaltungen zubringen, für die ich hier gerne etwas werben möchte.

Zum einen der Jugendumweltkongress (JUKSS), den ich schon sehr lange mitverfolge und diesmal auch etwas aktiver mitgestalte, imho eine der interessantesten Veranstaltungen der linken/ökologischen Bewegung im Moment. Der JUKSS ist stark fokusiert auf selbstorganisation und hierarchiearme Strukturen.
Traditionell werden auf dem JUKSS auch sehr häufig weitergehende Ideen außerhalb des ökologischen Spektrums thematisiert, so sind etwa Linux-Workshops und ähnliches seit Jahren quasi Standartprogramm. Diesmal soll dies im Rahmen einer (mangels besserer Ideen temporär so benannten) »Digital-Freedom-Plattform« intensiviert werden, wo alles im Bereich freier Software, Fragen des »geistigen Eigentums«, Projekte wie OLPC, ökologische Folgen von Technologieproduktion, Datenschutz etc. Platz haben soll. Mitgestaltung erwünscht, insbesondere kommt vielleicht der ein- oder andere Besucher des anderen Kongresses auf die Idee, temporär auf dem JUKSS vorbeizuschauen und den ein- oder anderen Workshop/Vortrag anzubieten.
Der JUKSS findet in Königs Wusterhausen bei Berlin statt.

Zum anderen ist natürlich zwischen Weihnachten und Neujahr immer der Chaos Communication Congress, diesmal der 23C3, statt. In dieser Form wohl einzigartig, gibt's eine geballte Ladung von gesellschaftsrelevanten oder einfach nur kreativen Technikvorträgen. Ich hab es diesmal trotz anderweitiger Pläne wieder nicht geschafft, mich selbst für einen Vortrag zu bewerben, aber vielleicht wird das ja nächstes Jahr was.
Spannend klingen schonmal »The gift of sharing«, »Kollaboratives Wissensmanagement im Bildungsbereich«, »Chaos und Kritische Theorie«, »Culture Jamming & Discordianism«.