How I came to the CCC
Four years ago I was at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin for the first time (23C3). It is an event that is organized by the Chaos Computer Club, a club that is well known for its expertise in computers and computer security and therefore often referenced by the media. Since I was interested in computers for many years and started to study computer science at the TU Darmstadt in that year, there wasn't really a choice, not to attend the congress. I really enjoyed it, it was a astonishing new world for me, with a lot of interesting people. Unfortunately I was not able to attend it in the following two years, but thanks to the recordings I could at least increase my knowledge. The next congresses I attended were the 26C3 and the 27C3 (just last winter). Since I went there with some more friends, it was even more fun than the first congress. In between I also attended the MRMCD (Meta Rhein Main Chaos Days) in Darmstadt (which takes place in the same building in which I also study) and other computer related events. I got to know so many interesting people this way and really want to thank the CCC and other organizers for these opportunities. I guess going into detail about the past events is not so interesting for you and it would be quite hard for me to remember the important things back then, so I'll focus on the last and for me most interesting event that took place just two weeks ago: the Chaos Communication Camp 2011. What you've read so far was just to show you, how I became a part of that hacking (not cracking) related scene, without ever being active in a local CCC community (maybe I'll change this in the future). If you get the chance to join a local community, I strongly recommend you to do so, though.
Tuesday
The Chaos Communication Camp takes place every four years in Finowfurt, a small village north of Berlin. The first official day was Wednesday, August 10th, so we (@konradfoertner, @humanerr, @dreamflasher, @3xbifdvgpsay, @laika2911 and I) traveled there on Tuesday with a group ticket for the train. The weather forecast said it would rain for the next five days, so we actually tried to get some pairs of gumboots at the train station in Berlin (we didn't succeed). When we arrived in Eberswalde, there was already a taxi waiting for us. The driver said, he had brought people from the train station to the camp for the whole day. Did I mention, that there were 3000-4000 people at the camp? After arriving at the campsite, we searched for a good place to set up our tents. We finally landed in the Blackout Resilient Technologies Village, next to the OpenLeaks tent (it was quite weird to see Daniel Domscheit-Berg so many times in real life every day). We then had a lazy evening inspecting the campsite (which normally is an aviation museum) and relaxing in the awesome Hx2 tent, which was quite cozy with all the beanbags, heaters and the music wish-list (thanks for that!). To get an idea of the campsite, take a look at the official wiki.
Wednesday
After sleeping quite long, I and two friends preferred running through the nearby forest to visiting the Opening ceremony. It was the first time I wore my Five Fingers on sandy ground - amazing feeling! Then we went to the Real to buy food for the next days. It turned out, Real was already prepared for us.
Hx2 had a grill built up, which we used (thanks again :) ), before setting up the infrastructure for our tents. There were so called "Datenklos" (data loos) distributed over the whole campsite, where you can plug in your network cable. We later got power and Ethernet working in every of our tents. :) After all that stuff it was already evening... I decided to at least attend some lectures. The lectures were held in the hangars of the museum, which gave the whole thing a great atmosphere. The main topic of the Camp was space and rocket science. I'm interested in that topic, but I think there are much more important things, the hacker community has to talk about. Therefore I didn't attend any lecture that deals with rockets and chose from the remaining ones. Transition Telecom was quite interesting to me, as I'm also very much interested in sustainability and rescuing the world. A working communication system is absolutely necessary for that in my opinion. In the r0ket talk it was explained how the little r0ket that every camp attendee got was built and what you can do with it (display your nickname, exchange vCards, play games, ...).
GPRS Intercept was held by Luca Melette and Karsten Nohl, who already became famous for his work on GSM at previous hacking events. Turns out everyone can sniff GPRS traffic easily, so you should not trust GPRS more than any other connection and always encrypt your traffic. Same holds for UMTS, because UMTS normally falls back to GPRS automatically, when it is not available. This will become a huge problem in the future, because old phones often use old software, that doesn't use encryption when communicating with the Internet. The last talk I attended on Wednesday was "We suck.", which was just a joke and not worth writing anything about...
Thursday
On Thursday I attended the talk of Markus Beckedahl about the Digitale Gesellschaft e.V., his plan for the Internet community to gain more power in political issues. In my opinion the problem here is again, that its structure is hierarchic - some have much more to say than others. The Internet community is too diverse to come to a consensus at every topic. Why should I support something, when I can't really influence, in which direction it is heading? There has to be a democratic process in such organizations, which I can't really see in the Digitale Gesellschaft e.V.. In my opinion, several organizations that deal with specific aspects / problems of the digitalization (privacy, open data, hacktivism, ...) are a much better idea than one larger super-organization, that is called every time the traditional media needs a face for Internet related issues.
After that, I attended a talk by Stefan Schumacher about the psychological basics of social engineering which was really interesting, although most of it should already be well known in the scene. It got even more interesting in the following talk with the nice title Steal Everything, Kill Everyone, Cause Total Financial Ruin!. Jayson E. Street reported about his experiences with social engineering and showed a video of him getting into a secured building as a total stranger. He also explained the implications this could have, if real “bad guys” would be in his situations.
The talk Legal, illegal, decentral: Post-hacker-ethics cyberwar was about the different hacking groups that appeared in the media recently (Anonymous, lulzsec, ...). Some of them have a very different view on cyber ethics than the original hacker movement. The talk was basically an overview of the different groups and a discussion about whether their actions make sense or not. When I left the hangar after the Imagine the Future of Money lecture, there were already lights set up on the whole campsite. Combined with the old airplanes of the museum this gave a huge show. I ended the evening by relaxing in a hanging mattress (which I helped hang up as a so called Angel) in these beautiful woods. It was quite funny to lie there and get in images of the place via Twitter.
Friday
The day started for me with the talk of Stephan Urbach about Decentralized clustering, in which he described the plans for the future of Telecomix. Telecomix helped to get Internet working during the revolution in Egypt, by setting up modems that could be used by residents of Egypt to establish a Internet connection through their phone lines (which were not censored). Then they sent the numbers that are needed for the connection via Fax to universities in Egypt. Really a great idea. Unfortunately Telecomix came to the conclusion, that they invested too much time in the project and replaced their site with a under construction sign and a video with an explanation. Let's see, what they'll come up with after the restructuring.
Then I attended the talk about wind energy plants, in which many details of how they work was described. Advantages and disadvantages that you seldom read anything about in the normal media, were described. If you are interested in technology / engineering and also in sustainability, this talk is a must for you.
Apropos "must"... do I have to say something about the talk by Dan Kaminsky that then followed? The explanation in the wiki hits it quite well: Watch it! And update your Linux Kernel. You should also watch the talk by Harald Welte: Applied Research on security of TETRA radio and if you are into programming or want to know, why today's computers often suck so much, watch Certified programming with dependent types by Andreas Bogk. He basically explains how you can verify Haskell code via Coq (in a way you don't have to be a math geek to understand it).
In the evening there was a "audiovisuelles Live-Hörspiel", an event well known from the congress. It is always a nice ending of the day and helps you to relax. This time it was about the Strugazki brothers, two russian Science-Fiction writers. Unfortunately it didn't really mean anything to me, because I didn't know the authors before. Afterwards there was a party in the OpenLeaks tent, with Tschunk for free. :) Luckily I did not walk in the human trap, built by the FoeBuD, afterwards.
Saturday
On Saturday, a friend of mine arrived (he bought an one day ticket) and I showed him around the campsite. Since we both own the book Die Datenfresser and the authors of it - Constanze Kurz and Frank Rieger - stood just some meters away, we walked to them and got our books signed. We also talked to them and then fefe (author of the most read german blog) joined us. It was quite an interesting situation, they are really friendly people. Then I attended the talk by Torbjörn Lofterud about poker bots. It covered hacks on how to let your poker bot interact with the poker program and also how to hide it from the gambling site (e.g. these poker clients often make screenshots to defend against bots). It also covered some basics of AI. The speaker told, he was not able to program a bot that breaks even (i.e. it wins more money than it looses in the long run). I'm not really sure if this was a totally true statement. ;-) After having some fun with a slackline and playing some Speedminton, I attended the Machine-to-machine (M2M) security talk, which I didn't find very spectacular.
As some of you may know, I'm quite a news geek. I have very sophisticated ways of sifting through a lot of information that is generated every day. Therefore the talk Rethinking online news was like it was made for me. The speakers showed a new presentation style for news, which I really liked. I hope we'll see a working prototype soon. In the evening there was the Hacker Jeopardy, for most hackers one of the highlight at the events. I preferred to watch the stream while laying with a blanket on a beanbag in the Hx2 tent. :)
Sunday
On Sunday I attended only one lecture, which therefore was very interesting and included a lot of discussion. It was about a subject, every traveler to the U.S. should look into, if he doesn't want to get into troubles: Laptop and Electronics Searches at the U.S. Border - A Privacy Guide for Travelers. The rest of the day I sat in the Hackcenter hangar, the last place with working power and Internet. ;-)
I left the campsite on Monday. It was a very interesting week, I've seen a lot of interesting stuff (you see a lot of these when you walk around at the campsite, which is quite nice, to name just some: a money generating tree, quadrocopters with lights attached, guerrilla knitting, the good old Tesla coil, ...) and had many interesting discussions. If there will be a Camp in 2015, I'm quite sure I'll be a part of it. :) I hope this blog post gave you an impression of what the Chaos Communication Camp is like.
And now some nice pictures and videos of the Camp, have fun: