Prickle-Prickle, the 24 day of Chaos in the YOLD 3189
H3: Instead of C3
[Updated with correct Gemlog link.]
A version of this was posted on Gemini 2023-01-06 but I thought it might also fit here. Go to my gemlog for somewhat more personal takes and see what I publish first. IPv6 only!
gemini://gem.hack.org/mc/log/
As long-time readers know I have participated in the Chaos Communication Congress (C3) in Germany every year since 2008.
Since C3 was cancelled this year I thought I'd arrange a very small conference of my own. I would at least try to gather some friends and acquaintances in chat and video conference and watch the decentralized events (Dezentrale Jahresendungveranstaltungen, JEV22) the community had set up instead of C3.
I didn't know what to expect of JEV22, really, so I thought there wouldn't be that much to watch. I was mostly hoping that at least the conferences Fire Shonks and Hacking in Parallel would give us something interesting.
P thought I would sit around and mope over a Club-mate for the duration… Which would probably be true if it weren't for my friends and some friends of friends.
I decided early on that our own event would be in Swedish and sort of invite-only by word of mouth, friend to friend. I don't think I could have handled it right now if we did it in English or had a totally open policy. I wanted it to be… cosy?
I explained my idea to my boss and since I usually go to C3 on company time he said I could do this on company time, too!
Naming is, as you know, one of the hard things in computer science. I decided to call the mini confrence H3. It has a few meanings in Swedish and English:
- Hacklunchare Hackar Helst (something like "#hacklunch members rather hack")
- Hamburg (was) Humbug (we're still) Hacking.
- Hamburg @ Home Hack.
- Hops & Hacking @ Home.
- Happy Harry Hardon, the hard talking pirate radio operator from "Pump up the Volume".
We gathered on a bridged IRC/XMPP/Matrix chat (hackint.org did all the job, really) and on a Jitsi my friend cos set up. I think we had something like 15 simultaneous users on the Jitsi at most.
We even had some talks of our own! I talked about the Tillitis TKey with a slightly better reprise the next day. kugg talked about "Fantastic anomalies and where to find them" and ln5 talked about how the "Tor Snowflake proxy" works.
When not doing presentations and listening to our own talks some of us kept the Jitsi open and watched JEV talks in another window. It felt almost like being at the congress.
I think this was a success, really. Now I want to do it again! Perhaps this is a start of a tradition?
All in all I watched 10 talks from the JEV22 if we include the two of our own I also watched. The JEV22 stuff will be available on
Mullvad VPN even got a mention as a VPN provider with sensible PQ crypto (Classic McEliece) from DJB and Tanja in their talk Post-quantum cryptography: Detours, delays, and disasters!