39th Chaos Communication Congress Videos

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Post-American, Enshittification-Resistant Internet Talk

  • The keynote about building a post-American, enshittification-resistant internet is widely praised as “very strong” and idea-rich.
  • Listeners highlight its critique of US trade policy, anticircumvention laws, and how trade leverage pushed other countries into surveillance–friendly regimes.
  • Some are skeptical that the EU will ever fully act on the kinds of structural interventions proposed.

Platform Censorship, Network Effects, and Lock-In

  • One commenter reports that sharing this keynote link on a major social network leads to near-instant deletion.
  • This triggers debate: if platforms are this censorious, why stay?
  • Replies distinguish between genuine “network effects” and “vendor lock-in”: when a platform stops serving users and only traps them, that’s labelled as classic “enshittification.”
  • Others note walled gardens and network effects can coexist; leaving still means losing contact with many people.

Recommended Technical and Security Talks

  • Frequently mentioned favorites include:
    • GPG signature vulnerabilities
    • In-house electronics manufacturing from scratch (praised for DIY spirit and inspiring tone)
    • Bluetooth headphone takeovers
    • FreeBSD jails escape analysis
    • Washing machine hacking
    • Asahi Linux on Apple Silicon
    • Rowhammer “in the wild”, cross-VM Spectre, AMD/console security, Titan M2 reversing
    • Precision time sync (PTP), ISDN deep dive, satellite link eavesdropping, Deutschlandticket fraud
    • AI in blue-team CTFs and “self-writing” AI loops
    • CSS-based clicker game, hardware synth DSP reverse-engineering, Freebox set‑top box exploit chain
  • Attendees disagree on some talks’ pacing and originality (e.g. one AI policy talk seen as over-scripted vs. a more off-the-cuff, unrecorded network-crypto talk praised as the opposite).

Workshops, Production, and Recording Choices

  • Hands-on workshops (ARP spoofing, “how the internet works”) are seen as “congress at its best,” though many are not recorded.
  • Some criticize video direction (too-frequent camera switching) and the decision not to record certain controversial sessions.

Logistics and Venue Constraints

  • Complaints: too few tickets, tickets released too late, and limited card payment.
  • Others respond that venue capacity and safety are the hard limit; the Hamburg congress center is already “bursting at the seams.”
  • Past moves between venues (Berlin, Leipzig, Hamburg) are recalled as driven by growth and logistics.

Politics, Antifascism, and Community Culture

  • A minority claims the congress is “worse every year,” with fewer technical talks and more politics, calling some content “left-wing extremism.”
  • Others strongly dispute this, listing numerous deeply technical sessions and arguing that antifascism is a long-standing, mainstream norm in European hacker culture, not extremism.
  • There is a broader clash over whether the environment has become hostile to people with non-left views, versus whether antifascism is simply a baseline defense of democracy aligned with hacker values.

Canceled AI/Consciousness Speaker and Epstein Emails

  • Regular attendees note that a long-time AI/consciousness speaker’s talk was canceled after private email exchanges with Jeffrey Epstein became public.
  • Links in the thread show emails discussing IQ, race, gender, fascism, and even theoretical mass executions; interpretations diverge:
    • Some see these as intolerant or dehumanizing and view cancellation as justified under the “paradox of tolerance.”
    • Others argue the emails are speculative, explicitly critical of fascism in the end, and that private conversations should not be grounds for deplatforming.
  • A replacement session about “tech transcendentalism” and this controversy was held but not recorded, which some find ironic: cancellation was triggered by leaked private speech, yet the critical debate is kept off record.
  • Event organizers and technical staff report that controversial discussions tend to be more honest and less performative when not recorded.

Miscellaneous

  • Several HN links point to separate threads on specific talks that attracted independent discussion.
  • The waving cat in the video player icon is explained as a “freeze detector” mascot for the video team.
  • Some meta-comments touch on HN karma/dupes and the perennial joke about “spotting the spooks” at security conferences.