Funny to see a bunch of (quickly flagged) comments that show a clear misunderstanding of what the German hacker scene is and wants.
Besides not being a monolith and this being amenable to labeling as such, it's still in many parts different from many other hacker scenes.
The CCC has always had the ambition (and backing credentials/skills) to be a political movement as much as a technological one. In fact that's the origin story of the Congress; Wau Holland inviting others to "do something" with these machines that were set to change the world. This political attitude always had a left and anti-fascist bent, IMHO something that Germany in the 80s, and nowadays, desperately needs.
The US scene in comparison (seen from far, just to be clear) looks much more comfortable with closeness to corporate and state actors. Having worked with the intelligence community seems to be more of a badge of honor over there?
In France in comparison the scene as I see it focuses much more on making things, while organisations like La Quadrature du Net are well known but small and not at all organized/supported in the grass roots way that the CCC is. Which is why they seem to enjoy the CCC events, it's always great to have them there. :)
I might be getting this very wrong, like I said I'm only seeing the US scene from "over here" and I only have shallow interaction with the French scene.
I'd also love to hear from other places and how your local nerd communities do in terms of taking political agency.
I left the CCC in 2020 after C3 crew decided that the cock.li mail-service is a fascist and started, escalated, and carried out an attack on its administrator Vincent Canfield [1].
Sorry, but throwing someone on the floor in front of the congress building for registering clearly sarcastic domains such as "hitler.rocks" and "nuke.africa" is just not what I understand under anti-facism. It's merely a power move for confirming your own moral superiority. I mean, just look at the website, and you will clearly see that the whole site is meant as a joke.
If you want to be political, you shouldn't start with labelling someone as "fac|rac|sex-ist" because that implicitly means that it's the end of the discussion. That's not how politics should work. Paul Graham wrote a wonderful essay about this. [2]
I'm now just donating my ex-membership fee to my local Chaostreff, since I know what kind of person runs that place :)
> clearly sarcastic domains such as "hitler.rocks" and "nuke.africa"
When I visit the page I'm greeted by a banner with fake quotes, here is a selection:
> I'm 200% n*ger
> Come fuck with a n*ger. I'm a business man
There is nothing that indicates sarcasm or satire there when it comes to all those choices, given that the site advertises itself towards 4chan users. At best it's edgy and infantile, at worst it's just the usual racist shit that is "funny" only to the people repeating it very loudly over and over and over.
Weird how the only flavour of "sarcasm" and "humor" people like you and the site owner can come up with is the glorification of nazis and making fun of black people.
For whatever reason, you are leaving out the fact that the testimonial section is user-generated content.
Everyone who donates at least $5 can put a testimonial up there. I think it's pretty prominent, shown right below the donation button under bitcoin/monero logo on the donation page.
Anyway, it could also be that I'm emotionally dumbed down in this respect after spending years on the internet, but I don't feel offended by this at all. Do you feel offended enough to kick the admin on the floor?
Do you have a trusted person that you can hit up for some advice on how human interaction in a society works? Please do it.
Because the more I read from you, the more I believe that you are either severely mentally ill or just an enormous asshole. I don't care what it is, but fix yourself.
And to answer the question: That guy should be grateful that he left with all his teeth, cause secu doesn't mess around. That's how wrong you are, and none of your entitled whining will change that.
With every sentence you write you manage to make yourself look more like an oceanic garbage patch of a human being.
I feel sorry for you that you seem to be absolutely unable to reflect your own behavior.
1) Disingenuously frame someone being removed from premises where they are not welcome as "decided that X is a fascist and started, escalated, and carried out an attack".
2) Care more about someone who runs services on "hitler.rocks", "nuke.africa" and "nigge.rs" than you care about CCC being kind and welcoming place for everyone - for example, people who might not want to be called "niggers".
3) Use "it's just joke bro" as a defense for despicable behavior.
I have no idea what someone like you was doing in CCC in the first place.
> 1) Disingenuously frame someone being removed from premises where they are not welcome as "decided that X is a fascist and started, escalated, and carried out an attack".
No, this is — to my best knowledge — what happened.
> 2) Care more about someone who runs services on "hitler.rocks", "nuke.africa" and "nigge.rs" than you care about CCC being kind and welcoming place for everyone - for example, people who might not want to be called "niggers".
No one is calling anyone like this. But I see that it's intentionally provoking through obscenity. However, it is not possible to determine the boundary between “obscene” and “non-obscene” according to factual characteristics, and everything about this is subjective:
For some people graffiti is obscene, for some people kissing in public is obscene, for some people name-calling is obscene, and some aren't concerned with whatever you do.
In fact, we can see this in this discussion: I see that the domain is using the TLD to break a taboo and to get attention, but I don't see an insult in this as it's not redirected at anyone harmfully. It's all up to the reader's interpretation.
> 3) Use "it's just joke bro" as a defense for despicable behavior.
I would agree with you, if he would actually make differences between race or sex. But he doesn't.
In the end it's just a vanity domain, which to me is funny for the reason that so many people get hung up on it, which is most likely the desired effect.
> Sorry, but throwing someone on the floor in front of the congress building for registering clearly sarcastic domains such as "hitler.rocks" and "nuke.africa" is just not what I understand under anti-facism.
I'm not familiar with what happened there, but at least to me these domain names are definitely not "clearly sarcastic".
> I'm not familiar with what happened there, but at least to me these domain names are definitely not "clearly sarcastic".
Have you taken a look at the website? [1] You should be able to detect that the site is satire within a few seconds.
Of course, we could dig up the whole “what is satire, what is x-ism” controversy up again, like after the Charlie Hebdo shooting. But I do believe that it's a joke, especially when looking at the context (what most people apparently don't do).
And before labelling someone as a fascist, that's undoubtedly the thing that you should do first: look at the context.
Why is cock.li trolling but the CCC is serious business? Perhaps they were just giving him a wedgie for ironic reasons.
My point is here is that it's very easy to fall into a pattern of 'it's satire when I do it to you, but it's cancel culture* when you do it to me'. I don't think of (or even about) the cock.li admin as a fascist particularly, but I'd be very surprised if he wasn't fully aware that his domain is very popular with fascist trolls and used for quick and easy sockpuppet manufacture and has been for years. You could believe in the importance of making anonymous email widely accessible and keep doing that, without necessarily pandering to the worst of examples of the people who use your service.
* or whatever the equivalent moral outrage of the moment is.
I actually enjoyed reading this comment because it's one of the few, which made me think and weren't just attacks or labelling.
I disagree with “it's satire when I do it to you, but it's cancel culture”. Yes, this statement gets often used by people who try to victimize themselves, but I don't think it's the case here. I can't find the words right now to express reasoning right now, but I'll come back later and revisit this post.
> but I'd be very surprised if he wasn't fully aware that his domain is very popular with fascist trolls and used for quick and easy sockpuppet manufacture and has been for years
Yes! I would be surprised too, if there weren't users who are coming from the right wing, but imo cock.li is actually a bad choice if you intend to harass someone online: The major social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Discord, Xenforo (customizable) and YouTube just straight up block all domains from cock.li from signing up because they have the same reputation as trash mails: They can be almost endlessly created without any major cost.
Besides that, the service also undeniably experienced abuse, like the bomb threat which was sent by some student to his school from madbomber@cock.li. But I think that's what happens when you mix young people (maybe social rejects?) + privacy. Same stuff as on 4chan.
Something else that made me wondering just at this moment: Reddit still does not require any kind of mail when signing up. This is quite surprising to me.
No, I haven't, because the parent comment was referring to registering these domains, not about what they serve.
I also don't want to judge whether whatever happened at that C3 was justified, but rather that it's not clear from just domain names if there meant in a sarcastic way or not.
>I left the CCC in 2020 after C3 crew decided that the cock.li mail-service is a fascist and started, escalated, and carried out an attack on its administrator Vincent Canfield [1].
You choose to ignore the anti-trans posters they hung up in the conference center.
Well, the dead account has some links which I won't repost. Feel free to reach out over IRC or email if you want other/more links I guess.
From what I gather is that the conflict around the website started at 35C3 with the posters and the general shitposting. It was pinned to the cock.li assembly and vc was then asked to not come back. Which they did 36C3 and resulted in the above video.
Whether or not vc knew all of this, or was directly involved, I don't know.
There were threads in 4chan /g/ around 35c3. Hard to find the photos now, but "Trans aren't real girls
wake up 35c3" post with the number "69115371" is in the thread: https://archive.ph/ki6Un
See other posts to get the impression.
cock.li, /g/, 4chan joint assembly printed and spammed these posters and their logo (you can see it in the OP post thumbnail) all around and were explicitly told not to organize an assembly on 36c3.
Regardless, Vincent Canfield decided to come to 36c3 and started conflicts somewhere around the Tor, GNUNet and some activist/political projects around there, then refused to get out when told to do so by orga and called the police.
At some point in the future, people will be studying and analyzing 4chan trolling the way they analyzed British political satire rags of the 1800s.
It is a new form of writing, though. Satire, today, is thought of as something that is known to be false, while trolling seems to be characterized by a sort of "stochastic truth" where the author is purposely ambiguous about whether they believe it or not. It lets the author of a piece of trolling say things that are clearly over the line, and mean it. It lets the author walk back the statements if they are unpopular and lean in if they are popular.
I do wonder if original pieces of satire and parody from hundreds of years ago were written with the intention of the same ambiguity of truth.
Political satire being taken as truth[0] comes with the territory. In fact, that's kind of the implicit joke. We laugh at every politician that reads an Onion article and thinks they need to rally the wagons to stop the $8bn Planned Parenthood Abortionplex. It is a rhetorical prank on the rich and powerful.
The problem with 4chan political trolling is that they always use the same fucking joke and there's no underlying satire to pick up upon. "Here's some people who don't fit in to the default social mold, now laugh and mock." This isn't satire, there's no rhetorical prank. This is just pissing in an ocean of piss. Even treating the board as a whole performative art piece is just running the OneJoke recursively against a large swath of probably-white, possibly-poor, definitely autistic people.
There is no ambiguity of truth. The people who treated /pol/ as satire up and left decades ago. The only people who remain are true believers interested in hurting people, including themselves.
How does this fit together?:
"Here's some people who don't fit in to the default social mold, now laugh and mock."
“a large swath of probably-white, possibly-poor, definitely autistic people.”
Also, Wikipedia says 4chan launched in 2003. 19 years ago. Which I doesn’t count as decades.
…waaait a minute… has my autism just eaten your onion? Layers upon layers to this satire thing haha
Not sure where that guy is from (and also dont want to judge the story at all),..
BUT there is not much like that here but one of the few and also by law forbidden taboos is this. With that, you are never clearly sarcastic, the opposite. No excuse, sorry.
For a long time, cock.li was hosted on Hetzner - until a bunch of bomb threats to schools in the US originated there. There was a fun little bit of government overreach involved too, since the german police seized the server twice - the first time they only took a single drive (probably as advised by Hetzner staff), and then, a week later, they demanded the entire server. It's pretty much implied that this was at the behest of US authorities, since a related FOIA request at the german feds was denied with "may cause adverse affects on international relations"
Where did the C3 crew say the service was fascist?
As far as I understand, he showed up to Congress and did a Hitlergrüße (Nazi salute) to their security. In Germany that is illegal and arrestable, so he should actually be grateful they only kicked him out and did not call the police. Germany has very strict laws against video-recording people without their consent, so creating this video would be considered another crime.
I can't speak for the content of the video itself, but I would imagine that most Germans would see "throwing someone on the floor" as a reasonable response to making the Hitlergrüße.
> As far as I understand, he showed up to Congress and did a Hitlergrüße (Nazi salute) to their security. In Germany that is illegal and arrestable, so he should actually be grateful they only kicked him out and did not call the police.
This is simply not true. Before the C3 took place, Michael required Vincent to remove all the unfunny stuff from his website to be able to register an assembly for C3. However, Vincent did not agree to this, so he didn't register an assembly.
Then, during C3 on the 27th Dec, Vincent sent out a tweet that he's on C3, and so he and a few users of his email service met informally, but not as a cock.li assembly. It wasn't a huge crowd, I think like 5 people(?).
Michael then approached Vincent and said, that he wouldn't be allowed on the premise. Vincent then offered to take it to the Arbitration Board, which was specifically set up for situations like this: When someone experiences sexism/racism or discrimination of any kind, they should take it to the AB, where the awareness team tries to find a mutually agreeable solution. Michael didn't like this proposal and just told him to leave within the next 5 Minutes.
Apparently the short-haired girl, which was following Michael, did not want to wait 5 Minutes. That's when Vincent sent an audio recording to himself and switched to video recording. That's what you see in the first post I made.
The phone which Vincent used for recording was seized by security. However, confiscating cameras or camera phones is the sole responsibility of the police or the bailiff. Stewards and security guards are not allowed to do that.
> Germany has very strict laws against video-recording people without their consent, so creating this video would be considered another crime.
This isn't true either. You are allowed to record if you have legitimate interests in recording the current event, e.g. when a friend gets knocked down to the floor by other people, as the others would be free to leave the scene if they really wanted to. However, you are not allowed to release the footage to a public forum without the consent of the party that displays the helplessness.
from my recollections , he was asked not to go, and he went there to ‘troll.’ he went to a gathering he was asked not to attend with the intention of being annoying, the hosts removed him.
i can’t think of a single bar, restaurant, etc in the world which won’t eject someone when they intentionally cause trouble. particularly if the person has been told they aren’t welcome.
why do some people struggle with this extremely basic rudimentary thing we teach every child—if youre annoying on purpose, people will treat you like you’re an annoying person.
just because some want to rename ‘be annoying’ to ‘trolling’ this doesn’t change the response you’re going to get.
again, this is super basic stuff. if you go out of your way to annoy someone, people get annoyed. very basic. it’s not shocking. it’s not scandalous. it’s basic behavior.
I left in 2018 for a similar reason. People there got really strict about what is an acceptable opinion and what not. I'm a person who is quick to say what i think, and sometimes its nonsense, and i feel most comfortable in environments where people can point out where you have the flaw in your thinking.
The scene around CCC is not like that. If you challenge some thinking there, people will feel threatened and will start looking for reasons to have you removed. The escalation with VC was another iteration of that, but not the first i witnessed.
Some Erfa's are still good, but my local one isn't, and after 34C3, i think the congress isn't, either. The CrewCrew secret police thing is still creeping me out.
The CCC is not run by hackers or for hackers. They are not considerate of viewpoints and ideas other than their own. They push a Marxist agenda where it is not wanted or needed whilst at the same time maximizing their own financial gain. If you have the balls (or stupidity) to point this out you are a fascist. Welcome to the CCC...
No, because it takes priority over the question of truth or falsity, and it outweighs everything else the person has done. Regardless how positive its impact has been.
Oh, like when some random person who is just trying to get by is subjected to slurs based on some aspect of their identity.
I could take the argument you made in a parallel thread and say that people who feel upset at being labeled fascist or racist or sexist could just choose not to be offended. Why is the question of truth/falsity suddenly so important when it impacts them, whereas it's irrelevant when they wish to make satirical/ironic statements that may or may not impact others?
Separate the artist from his art, and all this bullshit. That's the usual neolib reasoning, nothing new. Capitalists historically never had a problem with Fascism, only posturing.
> The US scene in comparison (seen from far, just to be clear) looks much more comfortable with closeness to corporate and state actors.
this is true, and it's one of the reasons I helped start cyberia.club and layerze.ro - US tech is deeply entwined with megacorps and it sucks the joy out of hacking, at least imho.
I too love a good talk on (e.x exploit research) and longingly wonder if in part due to attempts of censorship by companies, also the value of exploits if the 'glory times' of such presentations are over. Ultimately I respect the CCC for providing a platform to discuss difficult problems adjacent to technology as well.
I agree completely. There are many things I like about CCC. For example, corporate sponsorship is forbidden, and many speakers use handles rather than their legal name. This distancing from $dayjob helps to prevent government/military and corporations from undue influence, and also frees the speakers to say what they actually think about a technology, not fearing that they will lose their job over it.
Regarding the political bent, one big difference from the US is that people at CCC will openly express their disagreements, and are generally respectful about it. The only limitations are that Nazis are not allowed, which is partly because they are forbidden by law.
Absolutely. I can't reason people out of positions they haven't reasoned them into.
Apart from that, your whole comment is so fantastically out of touch and anglo-centric, that it's actually quite funny:
None of your "abstain from politics", "Marxist ideology" sound bites will elicit a reaction from the target audience of the congress, except laughter and ridicule.
It just reads as your FOX News/QAnon consumption fried your brain and no one will take you seriously, except the pitiful "look at the American trying to impress with big words he doesn't understand".
>We also welcome submissions that present a theoretical reflection on the impact of new technologies on artistic practices and forms of expression.
Finally, the perfect forum to deliver my perspective of ML and AI current state of music and the outlook for the next 1, 3, and 5 years. There will be a lot of hurt feelings. It will be very constructive however and show the roadmap between artists and engineers that is yet to develop in earnest and can potentially be the next largest US cultural export.
To use a simile, the current level of ML/AI music is about on par with a precocious elementary student with a basic understanding of an Akai MPC. That’s why you can listen to 1,000 of them and maybe one resembles a not-bad song. Not bad is not good mind you. It just means it’s not physically offensive / unlistenable to humans.
One of the hardest lessons for non-creative people to learn about the how of what I do need to understand creativity is inherently rule breaking. Derivative art - like that hack warhol’s Prince portrait- have a limited impact overall. Coming back from crazy town with a handful of cool images nobody has seen before like Dali? Now we’re talking!
There is hope in the sector, but unfortunately for the tech realm, you’re doomed unless you reconfigure your development approach to have 60% of the brain pathways look like spaghetti designed by a coked up ambitious chimp with Visio. I’ll have to dig it up but I heard guitar sales in the US increased during the pandemic…same basic design since the log.
The biggest issue with AI art isn't the quality, we can already make generative art that is faithful enough to not be distinguishable. It's that authorship is an inherent part of art, and nobody is really interested in art that has no human creator in the same way nobody watches bots play chess, despite higher quality of play. Authenticity is central to art, what Walter Benjamin called the 'aura' of a work. (it's unique place in space and time, which automated art does not have).
Keeping this in mind the NFT craze over seemingly random pictures makes more sense, because it was essentially a mechanism to give a replaceable, fungible, mechanic work an aura of sorts, anchoring it. Rather than fidelity, this will be the central question of the tech/art intersection.
And how much training and guiding did that take? It's not like they hit "generate" and the first try made some good music. This definitely took a ton of human guidance and curation.
Well, it's not really AI any more, it's more like a Beethoven Phrase Generator operated by a committee of Beethoven Music Appreciators. It's a cool thing and I'm also bullish on AI as a creative tool, but a lot of current offerings are great at small scales but fall apart on the larger structural level.
If you have an OpenAI account, try getting GPT-3 to write a short murder mystery, for example. GPT-3 is kinda good at dyadic and triadic interactions and even some kinds of story generation, but doesn't get the structural requirement of multiplying contradictions until a tipping point resulting in convergence (though I think LLMs can be taught that).
I wonder why the Congress takes place during the last few days of December. There aren't many travel options if you want to get back to your country before the new year.
It's traditionally and still a very DACH dominated event, for better or worse. Travel by regional/interregional trains around this time is perfectly fine, and it's a time where it's quite easy for a whole big community to synchronize for taking vacation.
Remember that this is not the type of Congress where people go on paid time. There are no sponsorships and generally no commercial interest behind this event, so I think (my guess, I have no data to back that up) that most people take vacation days and pay their own ticket.
("DACH" meaning Deutschland, Austria, Chwitzerland, if I'm not mistaken; i.e. the main German-speaking region. Not sure this is common knowledge outside of people that are in / regularly deal with DACH; I only learned of it 2 years after moving to Germany, being from the Netherlands.)
It’s a good chance to use your Bildungsurlaub allowance (education vacation?) where for 5 days a year you are being paid by your employer for educating yourself in a way of your choosing. C3 is recognized for that program almost everywhere in Germany.
As somebody else already said, it's perfect for the DACH region. Many companies close "between the years" (the 7 days between Christmas Eve and New Years) or run on a bare minimum staff.
It's easy for most people to take time off then and visit the congress.
CCC often reveals new software vulnerabilities. I don't know if it's deliberate, but if they reveal those vulnerabilities at Christmas, they ruin the holiday of whoever is responsible for fixing them - quite likely someone working for a big corporation.
People associated with the CCC most often do responsible disclosure. Therefore you can expect vulnerabilities revealed during C3 to be already known in advance to the vendor. AFAIK an exception to that are jail breaks, which have quite a history of getting announced during C3 without disclosing them to the vendor first.
Or "ruining someone's holiday" is a secondary effect. Simplest explanation is that it's easy to get vacation time from your "normal" job at that time compared to other times, so if you want to make sure as many people can make it as possible, those dates are likely to be the best.
Where were you trying to travel from? Last time I was at the congress, most people I talked to arrived by train, myself included, even if it took a day of traveling.
Thanks, just to make sure I am not missing anything, those are examples of presentations, but the proposals that were submitted for them are not provided, right?
Looking for them myself, found to guides to research and submitting proposals which I added to the original request for examples; neither though appear to provide actual submission examples.
The most important elements of the submission (abstract and description) are there. There's no reason to try to 'game' this, just submit a good talk proposal on a topic that aligns with the focus tracks of the conference.
The CfP is handled by people who are able to tell apart a bullshit talk with a well-written proposal from a good talk with a proposal written by someone inexperienced. :)
Mainly just curious what gets submitted as is, since guessing a lot of people have no idea what to expect and seeing prior examples would significantly reduce that gap.
(Also swear I have seen something like blog post that showed this before, but unable to find it.)
The sibling already answered in broad strokes. For the current congress, you're probably too late. Organizing the thing started, if I remember that correctly, somewhere around May/June this year.
There's multiple levels of organization, grouped under the various *OCs (Foo Operations Center), the best place to get to know them and get involved is at the congress through angel shifts. The second best place is probably to hang out in the various German/Swiss/Austrian hackerspaces during the year and getting to know people who are part of the orga.
You mean the CCC that was founded in the rooms of leftist newspaper TAZ at a table that was stolen from the anarcho-left commune "Kommune 1"?
If you don't understand that the CCC is and has always been anti-fascist, you're way off the path, friend.
Edit: forgot to mention: any notion that Antifa is a state-organized thing is misguided at best and wrong and in bad faith at worst. It's just not true.
Implying the German state of all things runs Antifa is at best risible. While justice officers and LEOs will always trend right of society, simply due to self-section based on the inherent authoritarianism of justice and LE in particular, the German security services have done a spectacularly bad job (way beyond Hanlon's razor) at preventing and prosecuting right-wing extremism, crime and terrorism for almost the entire existence of the BRD. The idea that the same security services who systematically covered for right-wing criminals run Antifa is just... I don't even know how you get that idea. Besides, the German police and justice system has been prosecuting Antifa and a large number of other left-wing organizations since always.
> Edit: forgot to mention: any notion that Antifa is a state-organized thing is misguided at best and wrong and in bad faith at worst. It's just not true.
I'm old enough and lefty enough to remember when antifa was Anti-Racist Action, and primarily skinheads concerned about Nazi skinheads. Glenn Beck really twisted the rightists' sense of history.
Who is this "Antifa" that you talk about? Are they in the room with us right now?
Calling the CCC a fascist organization is a pretty hot take that I haven't come across yet, I'll give you that, but as they say "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof".
If you work at a large company and live in a large city then there are probably some in the room with you. Just spend a little time on twitter, people are proud to self identify as such.
I'd like to see some credible sources for this claim please.
My impression is that individuals involved and associated with the CCC are not only experts in their field they often also have good understanding of how society is being challenged by climate change, deforestation, pollution, urbanisation and individual transport.
> a state sponsored left wing terrorist organization
[citation needed]
I live next to a gathering point of leftist/antifa groups in Germany, and given the fact they are "state sponsered" they happen to get a lot of needlessly violent police response. I'd imagine a state which "sponsored" a group would protect them from the state's executive. Also the CCC publishes consistently statements that oppose the current German governments plans regarding internet and surveilance. What is the purpose of a state sponsoring a group that ridicules their badly thought out policies on a regular basis? If I were a state I would not sponsor people that constantly show my policies to be of farcially bad quality, but hey, maybe this makes sense in your world.
Next we could go for the term "terrorist organization". In Germany we have a Verfassungsschutzbericht ("Report of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution") which lists all the violent or terrorist acts on a yearly basis. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution is and has been known to be overyly critical of left wing organizations (so much for "state sponsored" antifa) while being blind to right wing violence like a literal murder series (NSU complex), also because the early officers working at that organization had Nazi roots. STILL the report of that organization shows that right wing terrorism is magnitudes more common and deadly than any left wing violence. So if Antifa is a terrorist group, they are not very good at terrorism, because they don't seem to have a lot of impact in the real physical world that anybody can measure. Leftist violence is mostly against property or rightwing opponents. Right wing violence is against intellectuals, writers, journalists, migrants, politicians and of course leftists. Or you know, maybe the whole terrorism label is a bit far fetched for what I perceived as a more or less disorganized mess of leftist splintergroups full of edgy teens.
So we have a wrong claim of state sponsorship and a wrong claim of "terrorism", which mean I would not be too confident in the third point you are making there.
The CCC certainly leans left. So what? A lot of educational elite groups in Central Europe do. That is quite normal. If you were to ask the CCC they'd probably argue that in the US hackers are surprisingly comfy to be that close to the intelligence community and the state (which is precisely what you accuse the CCC of by being "state sponsored").
Funny how throughout my over 11k karma points the only comments that get downvoted without reply or clarification are ones that underline slightly left leaning viewpoints with facts.
I'd love to know the factually wrong parts of what I say, so I can avoid saying it in the future and maybe even adjust my world view accordingly. This happens with many issues I discuss, but when it comes to (on the european political spectrum) slightly left leaning topics there will always be certain people that downvote based on political orientation alone.
I think generally what we see as "slightly left leaning" ends up being "extreme left leaning" seen from the eyes of the US, as "center" politics in Europe would still be considered "left" in the US.
Basically, the baseline of the entire country leans so far right, that anything outside of the right seems at least slightly "leftists" in US politics.
All true, no worries. You cannot change world views.. to me it is always and everytime again really amazing how much some even generally liberal people, especially in the US, despite sometimes non-arguable facts.. as soon as it is a bit left (or not even that, just labelling it as such) it just either cannot be, or must be bad.
In addition the CCC is a regular contributor to parliamentary hearings - be it investigatory committees or in the context of new or revised legislation. They are an active part of society and their voice is being heard.
and because i followed the clink and clicked the poster link I see "This account was suspended following an FBI request. Please contact the support team. "
There have been quite some interesting social science talks at the last iterations of the congress. E.g. regarding the interaction between technology and society, quantitative analysis on bots on social media and such.
So whatever weird prejudice you seem to showcase here, maybe it is worth considering to get over yourself for something that interests... hackers. It is a hacker conference after all, and believe it or not technology also intersects with social sciences in interesting ways.
No thanks. If you don't want someone at your event, then that's one thing. But letting your attendees harass random people who've shown up otherwise in good faith is completely unacceptable.
All the we-pay-noone to participate is very weird in 2022 when information technology industries are potentially among the wealthiest. And particularly when the events are non-free-admission.
This is not an industry conference. This is a hacker conference, by the community, for the community. Many people involved are students, who really benefit from the admission prices being as low as they are, and the cool projects you see around the assembly area are so cool because they are from tinkerers, people with time (which is often mutually exclusive with money), people who do cool stuff.
Paying the speakers would increase ticket prices (though not by much), create a "why do they get paid when everybody volunteers" effect that would discourage volunteers, and ultimately likely lower the quality of the conference.
They make pretty clear that if travel costs are really an issue, they'll find a solution.
Disclaimer: runs free events, where organizers are volunteers, in which we're still trying to find sponsorship money for small speaker honorariums.
While I'm grateful to ccc organizers and understand that things are sometimes clearer and easier without the distorting effects of money...
I think defaulting to offering an honorarium to speakers is really healthy. The cultural baseline can easily be set to that any "financially comfortable" speakers donate it straight back without collecting, while only those who need it, keep it.
Why? Because speakers with many areas of expertise cannot afford to spend time speaking for free. Some really rad people can, but just saying that many cannot. And while it's maybe not a big deal if there's narrow representation of ppl volunteering at the ticket booth, there is a larger loss of possibility when cash-poor types of speakers can't afford to show up.
Speakers are the bringers of ideas, and who speaks affects the intellectual space that an event creates. And it might be said that creating that intellectual space is the main point of an event. The other motivation is maybe creating a new relational space, new relationships between people that tend to be fostered and grown around the feeding trough of presentation content.
So the "intellectual" is about "what gets broadcast" and "relational" is more about "who gets enticed to attend", and "which ideas fuck and make new ideas in the conversations between those attendees". All of the above flows from the speakers, and so I'd argue that it's more important to use the powerful magic of money to help certain speakers show up.
I think the sweet spot for starting to experiment with honoraria is: low enough to be a bit insulting to those who would be driven by the money, but high enough to meaningfully cover some costs for someone just trying to get by :)
I understand your point but the Congress is not really a typical conference where ideas flow from speakers to attendees.
Instead everyone is expected to contribute ideas (and even physically as a volunteers)
The talks are actually only a part of the whole things and the main track talks (for which this CFP is for I assume) are only a part of the talks (the rest are organized by assemblies)
It's very different to usual IT conf, even compared to FOSDEM.
(Not part of the orga, this is only my understanding as an attendee)
Volunteering is a very tricky and shady business. If it was not - we’d all be volunteering and getting paid without tax. There’s a reason for some limits in volunteering laws whenever they exist in a country.
I bet the same people running this whole thing are also very well paid techies. Not sure about the volunteers though.
And third, not last, the fact something is run by volunteers does not change it’s nature - it is still a business thing. Some expenses are paid for and eventually all the subcontractors are paid while the volunteers are not. Not fair at all.
Actually, there aren't really subcontractors. There _is_ a registered company called CCC Veranstaltungs Gmbh (CCC Events Inc.) which more-or-less owns a lot of the equipment (sound stages, lighting, ...) and nominally rents the venues and such, so that if the conference goes bust, there's a legal entity that can go bankrupt instead of individuals, but that's about it.
Food stalls are not hired by the CCCV GmbH, they pay to be there (and in turn get to dictate their prices), video streaming and such is handled by FEM e.V. (a non-profit that specializes in this kinda stuff) and is not paid (except for expenses, I think, but I don't have insights into that part of the finances) and truck drivers and such are actually volunteers.
"The people running this thing" are also volunteers. They do get a bit of money as an exchange for having to take unpaid vacations way in advance of the event for organizing stuff, but it's a far cry from "well paid". It's more of a "here's enough to not go broke on rent and food".
The whole thing is purposefully built like that.
There is 0 interest in having people on stage that do it for the money. Instead it is about people that deeply care about a topic and want to share knowledge, ideas etc with others.
It is not a regular IT conference. It is not a business thing.
I can see how from the outside you’d think that way. Hacker events are very different to big corporate conferences, and don’t intuitively make sense in a world where almost everything that happens is being done so someone can make a buck.
Everyone involved is a volunteer, or at the very most making significantly less money than they could running events of a similar scale in the real world, and they’re all doing it because there’s not really anything quite like these events outside of them. There’s a distinctly anarchic feeling to them, with a great many things that just organically happen because someone thought it would be fun, and then it got totally out of hand because other people latched on to it as well. The Chaos Post is a prime example of this, a postal service which is effectively a bunch of nerds cosplaying a worldwide postal service - I’ve known of people who addressed postcards to themselves, but at a future event on another continent, and they got delivered intact.
I know very well what a hacker event is and how it unfolds. Been on stage on few, helped as volunteer on some. IMHO - Generally this all manifest in a very similar manner to some communist movement. I’m not saying that it is bad to contribute to some idea, not even saying communism is bad. I’m just saying that there’s certain amount of hypocrisy in this scenario, you can downvote me as much as u want, doesn’t change the fact.
It is one thing to throw a party for 20friends and another to have FOSDEM sized gig. Such events are not presented in open ground in some forest by people shouting loud (been to such also, although for music). So they have cost - for venue, internet, electricity, screens, typically some food, drinks etc. As a presenter I have a cost for flight, accommodation, food, etc.
Someone pays the bill. Not for profit still has bills to pay. If you don’t pay deeds with cash, there’s some other value exchanged.
So why not support these people who contribute? What’s wrong with that, sorry I’m not getting it. Besides students very often participate by moving boxes between rooms, because for jobs that require responsible actions one needs an expert. Being a student I’d rather want to participate in something that actually teaches me something, but at the end the best I can hope for is to get to know some famous folks. But I can also do it as a visitor, right?
Besides not being a monolith and this being amenable to labeling as such, it's still in many parts different from many other hacker scenes.
The CCC has always had the ambition (and backing credentials/skills) to be a political movement as much as a technological one. In fact that's the origin story of the Congress; Wau Holland inviting others to "do something" with these machines that were set to change the world. This political attitude always had a left and anti-fascist bent, IMHO something that Germany in the 80s, and nowadays, desperately needs.
The US scene in comparison (seen from far, just to be clear) looks much more comfortable with closeness to corporate and state actors. Having worked with the intelligence community seems to be more of a badge of honor over there?
In France in comparison the scene as I see it focuses much more on making things, while organisations like La Quadrature du Net are well known but small and not at all organized/supported in the grass roots way that the CCC is. Which is why they seem to enjoy the CCC events, it's always great to have them there. :)
I might be getting this very wrong, like I said I'm only seeing the US scene from "over here" and I only have shallow interaction with the French scene.
I'd also love to hear from other places and how your local nerd communities do in terms of taking political agency.