191–200 of 232 posts
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Love that you complain about not enough people breaking the law and somewhere below complains about to many people breaking the law Let's be real, the videos get far to much eyes to break the law. There are smaller talks and groups where it looks different.
I'm not just referring to the talks, but the whole event. But we used to have groups like wikileaks heavily featured, they certainly weren't worried about too many eyeballs.
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Sure, but it is unarguably much more boring stuff than it was years ago. I attend almost every Congress with a variety of groups, and there's certainly been a culture shift over the years from lots of anarchists who had no qualms with breaking the law to much more corporate scaredy-cats. Congress seems to keep growing so perhaps this is just serving a broader audience. But knowing a lot of long-time attendees, I'm ce…
Love that you complain about not enough people breaking the law and somewhere below complains about to many people breaking the law Let's be real, the videos get far to much eyes to break the law. There are smaller talks and groups where it looks different.
Nowadays you cannot do that anymore, because most visitors are non-technical. Nobody respects the photo policy. Everyone judges your actions through their political lens. Instead all the "action" happens elsewhere and CCC became much more about social stuff, talking and politics. And of course about policing and judging other peoples' politics.
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The first one is indeed fascinating...almost deserving of its HN post :-) It has been submitted six times in the last 10 months, with a grand total of 1 comment...I though this site had Hacker in the title... https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fgfw.report%2Fpublica...
Common misconception. HN uses "hacker" as in "the people who do the work that makes Y Combinator rich" rather than "someone who plays with technology". HN hackers are contrasted with CEOs and so on - people whose job is not the on-the-ground work.
I do believe that originally Y Combinator indeed did celebrate the people who play with technology, but I guess over the many years the focus has shifted.
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CCC was always political (very left to far left). Never understood why hacking has to be political in the first place.
well, it has a lot to do with people growing up during cold war and german reunification. There were many stories where people lost faith in politics (e.g. after Chernobyl), so people gathered together to do stuff on their own. I think being "social" (to all people), decentralized and mistrusting authorities is just a left thing. so that's just a natural thing imho
But chernybyl isnt the only or primary reason.
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Common misconception. HN uses "hacker" as in "the people who do the work that makes Y Combinator rich" rather than "someone who plays with technology". HN hackers are contrasted with CEOs and so on - people whose job is not the on-the-ground work.
> HN uses "hacker" as in "the people who do the work that makes Y Combinator rich" rather than "someone who plays with technology" I do believe that originally Y Combinator indeed did celebrate the people who play with technology, but I guess over the many years the focus has shifted.
You can also look at the posts from the first day :) https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2006-10-09
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I've been there like 2 decades ago and even then it was a deeply political event. There never a time where German hacker clubs, which are the lifeblood of this event, weren't very political - and very explicitly left wing political.
We might be the same age; I remember that defacing conservative websites was already a C3 thing about 20 years ago. Back then, it felt good to punch up against authoritarianism. Hackers hated Bush and his Patriot Act just as much as many hate Trump now. In Germany, the CDU is of course the perennial enemy. But what happens when authoritarianism does not come from the right, but from the left or center? (Not a contrad…
Back in the Bush days it was about defending freedom but being to invasive about doing it. Nobody was talking about Bush they do about Trump. And the CDU of old is certaintly not the modern AfD.
Claiming the lefts action in covid even approches the lines of thought out of Trump, AfD or Putin isnt a serious argument.
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Especially as congress has, for as long as I remember, been about the superset of infosec, society, art, etc. IMHO it's more along the lines of complaining about any ride that isn't a roller coaster at a theme park--no one is forcing you to go on any rides, other people clearly enjoy them, they're not taking anything away from your roller coaster, and having them increases the diversity of the crowd in an ultimately…
Congress has become a radical leftist politics playground. That is the real problem. > Some people just like to complain that they have to take a shower and can't harass women like they used to like they could when congress was at the BCC and that kind of nonsense didn't immediately get you thrown out like today. You could never do that. A few years ago, some activists tried to make a fuzz with stuff like creeper car…
There is a talk on Chat Control though?..
One thing that still seems absent is awareness of the complete takeover of "gadgets" in schools. Schools these days, as early as primary school, shove screens in front of children. They're expected to look at them, and "use" them for various activities, including practicing handwriting. I wish I was joking [1].
I see two problems with this.
First is that these devices are engineered to be addictive by way of constant notifications/distractions, and learning is something that requires long sustained focus. There's a lot of data showing that under certain common circumstances, you do worse learning from a screen than from paper.
Second is implicitly it trains children to expect that anything has to be done through a screen connected to a closed point-and-click platform. (Uninformed) people will say "people who work with computers make money, so I want my child to have an ipad". But interacting with a closed platform like an ipad is removing the possibilities and putting the interaction "on rails". You don't learn to think, explore and learn from mistakes, instead you learn to use the app that's put in front of you. This in turn reinforces the "computer says no" [2] approach to understanding the world.
I think this is a matter of civil rights and freedom, but sadly I don't often see "civil rights" organizations talk about this. I think I heard Stallman say something along these lines once, but other than that I don't see campaigns anywhere.
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It is no longer the same. It went from somewhat exclusive dining experience to full blown nuclear junk food chain vibe. I've stopped attending it about 10 years ago. I rather prefer to watch some few interesting topics online, and skip all the wanna-be political junk.
You choose to ignore politics, but politics doesn't choose to ignore you. Ostriching doesn't seem productive.
But listening to pep talks of political opinions that are very opposite to yours does not seem productive, either.
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Having any hacker conference in the USA is a political choice, because it deters any non-US citizen from entry. The bars to enter the USA are high, including the coercion to hand over your accounts from social media.
The US is a large, well connected country with a lot of hackers, for all definitions of "hacker", it is even the country that created the term. And it is not that inaccessible to non-US citizens. Sure, the current administration is not very welcoming, but it is easier than, say, Russia (where a lot of hackers also live) if you want to attract an international audience. Anyways, it is the CCC, and they are doing it in…
CCC is German, and started in West-Germany. It is the oldest hacker conference. The second was USA (DEF CON), and the third was The Netherlands (theirs is approx every four years, and has a different name every year). The first one in NL was HeU 1993 (Hacking at the End of the Universe). This list excludes demoscene (IMO part of hacker culture due to reversing / cracking software, plus programmming and art in limited constraints, but at the very least it is related to); the first demoscene party was called Copy Party in Finland, 1980. Nordic countries are well represented in demoscene.
I am only aware of one person who fled USA to RU, and said person wasn't known in hacker culture before he did, plus he ended up there by mistake. By contrast, various people in infosec left USA for Europe. Jacob Applebaum went to Germany, Drew DeVault went to The Netherlands.
Since 2022, brain drain started in Russia due to the full scale invasion and war with Ukraine.
There's a very free country near the USA which does not have the ridiculous entry requirements the USA has. It even has a couple of large cities near the US border, including near cities with a rich hacker culture. Entry to said country is about as easy as entry to Germany. The country is called Canada. Yes, your neighbor.
May HOPE, DEF CON, and Black Hat end up in a tolerant, hacker-friendly country. I am not aware of brain drain due to Trump II. I mean, it is happening, but it also happened during Bush era, and the proportions I don't know about.
As for CCC being held in Germany. They have been very open to foreigners (as have us Dutch been), famous USA hackers were always welcome (and came) to hacker conferences in NL and DE. Talks in NL were almost all in English, at CCC partly (German is a relatively popular language in Europe). Nowadays, almost all German talks get dubbed and subbed. So CCC is very American-friendly, cause we Europeans get that Americans speak almost exclusively English only.