I visited the 37c3 this year - which is the yearly congress of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) and associated groups/creatures. It is the 37th Chaos Communication Congress, which takes places after 3 years of Remote Chaos Experience.

Before arriving at the Congress, I tested some communication options like Briar, Meshenger and tested having a Freifunk wireless uplink from my previous post on some device.

We could have also gone to the congress at Day 0 in the evening to see the location, but we didn’t feel like it, so we spend some time in the hostel and got some sleep.

At the Day 1, I arrived at 11 am at the congress center hamburg (CCH) - which really is a huge congress center. Funnily, they covered the H with a white C - so that it is the CCC

The place is really huge and has a lot to offer on 4 floors. The ground floor includes Hall H, which includes a lot of major builds, a submarine, chaos communities and other things. You can see a floor plan taken from the https://c3nav.de page below

Everything is really huge, and very impressive - how many cool things are made by so many people, which creates such an impressive feeling.

Due to a reasonable quite restrictive photo policy, one is only allowed to take pictures, when every person in the picture did give consent to it. This of course is nearly impossible for larger groups of people, which is the reason why there are no pictures of the event (or the Chaos Communication Camp, which is even bigger) where one can see the huge crowds. This matches the name of this blog quite well, and is also the reason why most of the pictures are taken in portrait mode here.

Post office

Parts of the congress are nearly an autonomous city. There is a post office which is used to send post cards to people at the 37c3. It can be used to send post cards across the congress for free to other people in an assembly. But it is also possible to send post cards from somewhere else to the congress or send postcards to someone in germany for a small fee. There are also post stations which are collected daily.

Phone operation center

Besides that, there is the phone operation center (POC), operated by people from eventphone. This is very nice as it supports SIP, DECT, and for people with a chaos-sim also 2G/3G/4G (which seemed to be a little unreliable though) Weirdly, they did not support connecting to the SIP server through TLS - only TCP and UDP worked. Also sending text messages through SIP was not supported. As I asked someone from the POC, I had a small weird dialog:

Hi, I had problems connecting my SIP through Linphone using TLS, only UDP and TCP were working?

POC: We do not support TLS connections.

Oh okay, and text messages with SIP did somehow not work?

POC: Text messages only work for the SIM-Cards

Well thanks, but I thought to get some more information on the reasoning. Typical experience one has with people who do not like to talk a lot.. Not everybody likes talking on the congress, thats for sure. I mean, the data stream is still encrypted through SRTP, so it is not a security issue, but a MITM could still spoof who talks to whom.

But overall, the SIP/DECT experience works very well to call people on site.

Angels

One can register as an angel in heaven (a place on the first floor) to do voluntary work:

• helping at bars
• removing crates with empty bottles
• admission control
• cloak room
• infodesk
• CERT (health support)
• angel kitchen (to make food for angels)
• and many more jobs are available

This is a very good way to balance the work of the congress to keep everything clean and operative across a lot of people. Of course, one does need some special qualifications to work with food or have a medical education to work at the CERT.

First day

At the first day, I did spend a lot of time to get familiar with the location. I walked across the Hall H which was very artful and dark - every CCC community did have a few tables there and brought interesting projects with them.

There was the Abbaubar (disassembable) - I first thought, that it is a pun with it being a bar with something to drink, but I was totally wrong. The whole place is easily disassembable into small crates. They also had a few radio headsets which can be used by visitors with 3 different radio channels to listen to music.

Chair simulator

In that area, there also was a chair simulator in that area, where one can sit on a chair with VR googles and operate a windshield wiper and a chair.

The idea is to get a feeling of becoming a chair, that you have totally different desires doing that.

Portrait robot

There is also an automatic portrait robot, which takes a picture of you and draws them with lines. Unfortunately, I did not take picutres of the result, still I think it is a very interesting project which has a variety of different tasks of different fields:

1. take a picture
2. process the picture to create wireframe of relevant contoures
3. create a path of that wireframe which can be drawn without stopping
4. translate that path into instructions to the two servo motors which decide the pen location

There was also an automated puppet theatre which had a story about the arbitrarity of flat renting portals and automation.

Talks

I listened to a few very interesting talks in Hall 1 of the CCH. It is very impressive that about 3000 people are coming to see these talks.

• Julian Assange talk from Holger Stark
• Vaccum cleaner Hack from Dennis Giese which is also known from work in the context of the vacuum cleaners (https://dontvacuum.me/) and his work is used for the open-source vacuum cleaner project Valetudo
• Tesla hack using voltage drop - this is a showcase, of how dropping the voltage on some connection can bypass loading signed firmware - a topic I did not know a lot about before

When walking around, we also saw some analog field telephones which were connected through some small wire (Klingeldraht). This was very interesting, as I first got to see how analog telephones actually work. On the left side of the picture, on can see the operation station, which receives the call requests and actually connects two callers by wiring the two phones. Afterwards, to stop the call, the caller needs to ring again, to give a signal to the operator to unwire the call.

In the evening I drank a lot of Tschunk, which is quite tasty before going back to the hostel at 4 o clock.

In one of the rooms, there is techno music the whole day (11:00-06:00). It is also very artful.

Day 2

On the second day, I did spend a lot of time in our Bits & Bäume Assembly, which also includes a lot of NGOs which aim to create a better world.

Some of them are

• Openstreetmap.org (OSM)
• Wikipedia
• C3S - who want to create an alternative to the GEMA
• CADUS - who are helping in catastrophies
• Amnesty
• Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte (GFF) - who lobby for freedom rights
• epicenter.works - who create digitalization education material in Austria

I always had the impression, that Wikipedia gets too much money for doing to little. When talking with them, I had to consider that wikipedia does a lot more than only providing the website. It also includes lobbying, that Wikipedia is not a large social network and has to do upload filtering, providing knowledge exchange, organizing events and so on. The majority of employees are actually IT people creating tools to optimize and automize things. So I do not really know what to think about this, but it left me with a far better feeling that Wikipedia is an organization where donations are well received.

There is also a seed exchange for herbal seeds of various kind, which seemed to have worked qiute well.

I also talked to the people of OSM about how one can include automated import data in a way that it is accessible. For example, there are a lot of open-data datasets, which are available in some open-data portal in a weird format, but are not accessible in OSM or something. OSM also does not want to include automated imports, as they can conflict with previously edited data and might not be as well curated as manually edited data is.

So they eventually suggested uMap where one can create own maps. I still need to see if this fits all of my use cases, but it is an interesting option to add new layers.

At the end of the day I walked a while through Hamburg as the bus did not have its schedule after 00:00 anymore

Day 3

At the third day, I spend a lot of time sitting at the Freifunk table.

As there are also a lot of people who are just sitting on their chair throughout the whole event and sometimes discuss with other people. I don’t know, the congress has so much more to bear, but people can be of course very different.

A friend of mine did engel a lot (spending time doing the volunteer work) to get an angel T-shirt, which is also a very nice way of getting to know the congress.

We met a friend at the congress and went to eat burgers in the city of Hamburg and did afterwards go to the Gluon meetup. Gluon being an OpenWRT-based firmware used by Freifunk communities.

Visiting the other spaces is also very artful and lovely. Many provide workshops or show off some things.

There are also some lockpicking communities or as it is called in Germany the “Sportsfreunde der Sperrtechnik Deutschland e.V”. Where one can try to open a unlocked door with a sheet of plastic.

Day 4

Somehow, the loosly scheduled days and long nights were very exhaustive for me and I did not feel very well at the last day, so I stayed a longer while in the hostel, before I went to the OpenWRT meetup, enjoyed the last day, talked about some improvements to Freifunk packages.

I did went to sleep earlier so that I can have a nice new year without being to exhausted. The train travel back was also very easy.

It is such a huge difference, being in Germany, where you somehow can trust people and leave things laying around and not being filmed all the time. Especially in contrast to Brazil, where you do not find an elevator or corner without a CCTV installed - the congress is the very opposite to that.

A congress is a very fun experience and a real highlight at the end of the year, though I must say, that I like events with a shorter duration better. I really must say, that I am very happy being at home again.

So have a great new year!