Almost four months after the last CCC congress took place, the promised recordings of the lectures got released. The process took apparently so long because it was initially planned to release the audio files together with video captures of the talks. Unfortunately some problems occurred during the encoding of the videostream causing the video not to be in sync with the audio anymore.

Nevertheless the audio files are now available via Bit Torrent. Get them here (Ogg Vorbis, 2.19 GB).

I never really got why videos are so important anyway. The audio together with the slides of a talk are more than enough to follow and understand the content. I don’t see the added value of video, beside the cute lecturer’s facial expressions.

[The Turkey Curse]

The slides for the majority of the talks of the 21C3 are now available through the “fahrplan”. Their individual download link is located on the detail page for the single lectures.

If you are too lazy (like me) to click though all single detail pages to obtain the slides, you could try this link, but be forewarned: the URL might not be final and might be subject to potential future changes.

[21C3 Weblog]

I attended a talk on the L4 Microkernel at 21C3. Close to the end of the talk was a inaudible conflict of opinions between the lecturer and a member of the audience. I couldn’t figure out, what the reason for the differences between the two was. The member of the audience left the room with the words “what a waste of time”.

If there was another feedback mechanism instead of getting the microphone and asking questions, it would have been possible to get a more in depth insight. Weblogs and other webbased forms of publication have a significant advantage due to their feedback possibilities e.g. via trackback and comments. But I also value the conference model because of its compact presentation form and the potential in-person contact to the lecturer.

Sometimes I wonder if there could be a way of combining the advantages of the two distinct models?

• Live IRC chat? Nah.
• A weblog per talk? To much overhead.
• A conference weblog with one entry per talk? Maybe. The 21C3 weblog was already a step in that direction.

Proceedings for the Chaos Communication Congress are available for the first time. This is very good news. It was rather difficult to find the presentation slides for talks in the last years. Usually the speaker would announce to publish his slides online but rarely announced the URL. And the central documentation page for presentation slides on the congress’ webpage stayed pretty empty.

The proceedings contain full papers for approximately a third of all talks including highlight like Peter Glaser’s keynote, Daniel Bartlett’s “Automated hacking via Google” or Angelo Laub’s “Practical Mac Os X Insecuritiy”.

The proceedings were available in printing on the congress and got released online afterwards. Get them now as pdf.

I am happy.

Norbert published his great pictures from the 21C3. Check out especially the last image of the set – a paparazzi shot of me harassing Emmanuel Goldstein.

The concept of lightning talks works astonishingly good. Not all of the short talks are equally good but because of their limited length it doesn’t matter. It also turns out that 5 minutes are enough to get a sufficient introduction to a project/topic.