Chaos Computer Club - archive feed

The results and winners of the Field-FX weekend demo competitions. We will show all the best demos and other productions and highlights from all the best submitted over the course of the festival. about this event: https://c3voc.de

I’ve made some installations and art robots over the years, getting gradually more ambitious, and somehow this has turned into a job and a robot company, Air Giants. This talk is about that process, and about how taking a daft idea more seriously than seemed sensible at the time has turned out to be the right thing to do. I’ll also be talking about luck and money and logistics, all the things that...

Back in 2018 I got involved in an arts project called Pick Me Up and Hold Me Tight, by ZU-UK. The goal was to raise awareness of male suicide by making all 34,000 UK pay phones ring at 11am on New Years Day. Initially I backed their crowd funder as it seemed like a good cause and also I was curious how they were going to make that many phone calls technically. This is the story of how I ended up a...

The USB type-C connector has become the universal connector for modern devices. It is able to transmit USB, video, power, and more, Often doing several of these at the same time. All, while maintaining backwards compatibility with older hardware using relatively simple adapters. This talk will explore the methods used to make this possible and the consequences of not following the spec (e.g. Inval...

Using end of life or 'scrap' EV & Hybrid parts and opensource firmware I'm making an electric motorbike, having got tired of making dirty diesel ones! The scrapyards are now filled with slightly broken EVs and Hybrid cars, and almost no one knows what to do with them. As a result the parts they are made from are very affordable and available for repurposing and hacking into your own projects. The...

"Tech companies don't tell you this but you can just repair phones, I've repaired 458 phones" Building a tech mutual aid from scratch and getting over your fear of failure, a tour of the highs and lows of building a local community, and why it's worth it. about this event: https://c3voc.de

We go through the last 4 years of badge development, leak the 2020 badge design and give a run-through of the development process of the TiDAL badge about this event: https://c3voc.de

Is it possible to trick a facial detection algorithm with... yarn? In this talk I will explore the possibilities and process of making a knitted garment to trick facial detection into seeing faces that aren't really there. This talk will go through how these algorithms work (at a high level), and then the process of making an image into a pattern, knitting it, and testing it. about this event: htt...

Stories from the frontline of those trying to redirect the next $3.6 trillion of global investment into demonstrably carbon net-zero outcomes. This decade is arguably the 'last roll of the dice' when it comes to acting on climate. We've spent the last two years digging deep into financial and policy systems, working out how to shift money away from fossil fuels and towards things that might not be...

Writing a gameboy emulator is probably the most rewarding hobbyist project I've ever embarked on. Not only is the process educational and enlightening, but it's hard to describe the satisfaction of playing Tetris on an emulator that *you wrote*. An emulator from scratch is not a small undertaking, but the Gameboy is well documented, and just simple enough that's it's possible for one person to wri...

On the surface of it it seems simple: tech and maker types have skills they enjoy using, and community groups have unmet needs that could be helped by these skills. Why then does it feel so incredibly hard to make these collaborations happen in reality? And why does it feel even harder to do it while meaningfully fighting the Tories, transphobes, racists, and neo-Nazis? This talk takes it back to...

For years I've dreamed of building a scale model of a large railway station in the UK. I've also want to fully automate that layout, running trains in "real time" because I like a challenge. A few years ago I discovered that Network Rail provide access to loads of their data for free, and the part of me that loves half-baked ideas said "You could use that to run the model railway instead of coding...

A section of an airliner wing, born in North Wales and brought up in Toulouse, France and operated in South America, now lives in the Aerospace Bristol museum. This talk shows our experiences with building it into an interactive exhibit explaining how aircraft high lift devices work, and discusses what we've learned about using hobbyist electronics for an installation that has to run 24/7 for visi...

"The Enigma Machine was an electro-mechanical device used in the mid-20th century to encrypt communications. An ingeniously simple and elegant combination of cogs, wires and lamps, all fitting into a portable case, it provided some of the strongest encryption possible at the time. During various Covid-19 lockdowns, I decided to re-enact this important development in the history of computing, throu...

Scratch is a programming environment aimed at children ages 8 to 16. It's simple and easy to learn, but lacks many features that experienced programmers have come to expect, such as version control, bitwise operators, or integers! This talk provides a high-level overview of authenticated encryption with ChaCha20-Poly1305, and X25519 Elliptic-Curve Diffie-Hellman key exchange (both used in modern p...

Placeholder for the first Lightning Talks session about this event: https://c3voc.de

You put a bunch of scooters online and you have an app that can tell you if you're near one so you can hire it. But what can people do with that knowledge? What can you figure out if you can track a scooter's position in real time? What insight do you have into businesses? And how do you do this in the first place? This talk covers how to reverse engineer an app so you can obtain information yours...

A few of us struggle with completing projects. They pile up, often literally. A multitude of unhelpful feelings follow. Project management tools help but never seem to address what really holds us back. We start a new project, and the pattern repeats. You are invited to break this cycle. Come gain a deeper awareness of what stands between you and the future-you who finishes what they start. Leave...

What, exactly, does a gender transition involve? Over time, it has increasingly become the case that there is no simple answer. The degree to which people can now pick and choose what they want in terms of (de)masculinizing and (de)feminizing effects/procedures is astonishing - even to many transgender people and medical professionals providing them care. Much of this customization is especially a...

Should we really be trying to make our tech indistinguishable from magic? Is there dark magic in tech? And what does that have to do with a teleporting duck in a classroom?! We often hold creating 'a magical experience' as a key goal for design - it's fun, engaging, sometimes even playful, and it makes complex things look simple. But technological magic has a dark side too, especially when trying...

In 1939 World War 2 started and the British Council—Britain's shiny new organisation for overseas cultural relations and propaganda—inherited the suddenly-closed tourist board's film-making department. Tourism films are no use in a war, so the Council turned their topics towards more cultural content as a softer kind of propaganda. Thus began a decade of film production that would have phenomenal...

Sound effects are often heard but not explored. In this talk I will explain what goes into the process of creating video game sound effects, the way they impact a scene and how the smallest changes can make a massive difference to video games. Join me as I show you how I create sounds for video games, why sound matters and helps players immerse themselves into the game's story and world. about thi...

Every year we collect more data than before, and the tools we use to manage that data are evolving to accommodate our changing needs - but it can be difficult to keep up with all the innovations! This session will give you a tour of what's happening in open source databases, from someone who lives the adventures of open source data in her day job. You will travel from the well-trodden paths of rel...

I'm an artist creating interactive installations. The hardest part is devising open-ended interaction, spaces that invite people to reveal their authentic selves, and to connect with those around. But trends in technology have gone in the opposite direction. Whether it's for usability, profit, safety, profit or 'sparking joy', or profit (it's usually profit), 'User Experience Design' was the flavo...

Stickers are an essential part of our culture, our values. Stickers are everywhere! But why? This talk will provide serious, evidence-based insights into the newest developments of the evolving discipline „Sticker Research“, including an overview of the the most recent peer-reviewed publications, highlighting the most valuable facts and findings. (And some stickers, of course.) ==> Update 2022-06-...