This year I had the chance to attend Chaos Communication Congress. It took place in Hamburg, it was the 30th (yes, it organized since 1984!) and it is the biggest hacker's festival in Europe. It had many amazing presentations and much more things to learn and discuss about hacking. I'll try to write some of the things that I liked most.
Presentations or not?
The event duration was 4 days, each day had many presentations and some times it had 4 presentations at the same time. So it was impossible to see all the presentations at once, of course there was live streaming and recording so you can watch them later. I am not sure which is the best way to spend your time there since you have to choose either watching a nice presentation (which is recorded and you can watch later as well) or do fun stuff and talk with all these hackers around you. There were many events, workshops, people who knew their stuff and it was great to meet and discuss with, so I am still not sure what it's the best. I think the best you have to do is to be organized and watch the presentations that you really like and try to meet more people around the fields of your interest.
What impressed me most
- Keynotes from Glenn Greenward, the guy that worked with Snowden and provided "sensitive documents". You can read the transcription
- Wikileaks founder, Julian Asssagne
- Tor network presentation
- Presentation of zmap.io, internet scanner which allows you to scan the complete IPv4 address space in a decent time
- Hacking microSD cards
- A presentation and a workshop later for hacking SIM cards. There is a linux distro which can discover vulnerabilities for your sim card
- They have setup a GSM network inside of CCC building, you could buy a SIM card and make calls! There are some presentations from the past CCC of how they built it
- There was a nice lockpicking hands-on practice area where you could try picking different locks and get help for undestanding how a lock works
- An area for creating...
...
- We were also there with a friend who created reicast, a dreamcast emulator which works on android
Overall, CCC was an amazing conference where you could learn and discuss with very interesting people and hack together. There were many events were you could participate with other guys as a team and solve riddles, problems and learn from the whole process. There were about 30% more people this year compared to the last one, about 9000 regarding wikipedia. It is obvious that more and more people are interested about hacking, anonymity etc.