For my technically-minded friends, here are links and notes to the significant presentations and workshops I attended at CCC, December 2011. More
social aspects of the whole experience are in my other post .
Alternative networks
Just after the midnight between the Days 1 & 2 was the workshop on
Free Network Architectures , which for now means Mash Networks, GNUnet, and other forms of "darknet" (there's a good article about it
here. The best thing was to see all the people involved in these activities; main point was that these kind of networks require users that are not feeling like consumers, but users that are
participants, and
take responsibility for their own "node" in the network. Follow-up: two events were announced: Wireless BattleMash in Athens, in March, and "International Summit for Community Wireless Networks" in Barcelona in September. (links?). Theory:
Autonomous_Internet_Road_Map
The biggest "mainstream" talk on alternative networks was, of course, about Tor, by Jacob Apelbaum & Roger. They got a standing ovation, for saying things like "We have lived the entire course of human history without total surveillance state - we don't need one now". It was impressive, provocative & engaging. (
description&
video: "How governments have tried to block Tor").
Applied security
Next best thing was p2p-sec workshop, on securing BGP in decentralized way. There were 10 of us, some people from
TechInc, and some newcomers, from the Free Networks "movement". There was a momentum to continue cooperation, but now, after a month, I see that the progress is slow. In the meantime, the new IETF list was created: "therightkey".
Very important for me was also the talk by Peter Eckersley from EFF on
"
Sovereign Keys: A proposal for fixing attacks on CAs and DNSSEC"
description& the
video.
After his talk I tried to make him interested in applying his theoretical solution to BGP, and if I'm lucky he will :) (his suggestions are already discussed on "therightkey" anyway...)
I also went to "CAcert" workshop, since with RPKI we (NCC) will become a CA, so I asked the workshop leader to take part in the RIPE lists & other community efforts to make sure we do not repeat their already known mistakes.
Measurements
I did pay attention also to topics related to my actual job: measurements of Internet performance & data visualization. One of the relevant talks was from Ruben & Chris:
Choke Point Project. I have invited them to take part in RIPE community, we'll see what develops from that.
I also found very interesting
the NOC report by Will & Kai (also from the RIPE community & HXX community) (see
video. They showed the
Network Monitoring tool with a SUPER COOL Dashboard!! (
code from GitHub).
They also mentioned ring.nlnog.net; icinga, that uses IRC alarms; & via Sylvan I've met Stefan from
Tranalyzer project (flow based traffic analyzer).
Talks I've Missed but I wish I saw
Evgeny Morozov - Marriage from Hell ,
Building a Distributed Satellite Ground Station Network
And also: Social Swarm , Counterlobying EU institutions,
Your Disaster/Crisis/Revolution just got Pwned (Telecomix and Geeks without Bounds on Security and Crisis Response)
I wish I did not go to see Dan Kaminski , since he gave the same talk as on the summer CCC; however, his Net Neutrality Rooter (Nooter) is still interesting as a concept. Any "Running Code"?
For everything else that I've missed, here is a brilliant alternative overview:
reluctant blogger:
5 small articles, hilarious and very to the point,
by Dmytri Kleiner, Venture Communist from telekommunisten.net.
Selected quotes:
-
"You can not claim that you got your user's informed consent if you lie to them", Jakob (so poly! :)))
-
"We choose the world that we live in. We must reject "lawful interception" and surveillance ! " Jakob:
-
Poster/picture: "[Lolcat] I can has Freedom? TorProject.org"
-
"When we moved from infinitely terrible to infinitely terrible minus a little bit: that's progress", Wes Fabler (Hell Yeah, It is Rocket Science)
-
"Does Hacktivism Matter?" (Nothing Really Matress ;-) )
-
"Canadians are relatively mild", RedBeard in the talk about Dragnets
-
"We live in the world in which we make mistakes or misjudge the consequences... ", Cory Doctorow
-
I like to think that "we choose the world that we live in", and that events like CCC are contributing to this realization, and making it possible to add my bit to the building the world where I choose to live in.