Chaos Computer Club - archive feed

Durham University Electric Motorsport (DUEM) are the UK's longest running solar car team. We are entirely student led and run, doing this outside our academic studies in our free time at Durham University. Established in 2002, we have been at the forefront of innovation in this field for the past 14 years. We are the only solar car team in the world to design, build and manufacture every single co...

Can we employ the techniques we have for securing, validating and managing data, and building, testing and deploying code, controlling access and apply them to our personal data and the devices running our homes? So we know if the objects in our home are working properly. about this event: https://www.emfcamp.org/schedule.frab

What if something really really bad happened to earth? What if modern civilization would suddenly collapse? Some people who are worried about these questions (the "preppers") build underground bunkers and hoard food and water. But is this really the best way to prepare? I am going to look at things we can start doing *today* to become "smart preppers" -- hoarding knowledge, seeds and tools instead...

Cyber insecurity often feels like a horror story, and the idea of cyber security an out-of-reach myth. The last couple of years have seen breaches that are bigger, and of a higher profile, than ever before. When we trace these breaches back to their cause, we often find that attackers took advantage of human behaviour, via social engineering, poor password management, gaps in physical security or...

About four years ago I built a diesel motorbike, the most successful of three I have made. I would like to share the experience of how, using minimal tooling and tight finances, I successfully adapted a road registered motorcycle to be powered by a diesel engine and the problems I encountered to complete it. The drive to do such an unusual thing was partly the engineering challenge but mostly the...

Building an open source hardware company from scratch wasn't my plan when I started Project Ubertooth, but the project led me to form Great Scott Gadgets, a thriving business that is still growing five years later. I'll discuss lessons I learned during my first year in business and how the decisions I made at that time have shaped the company that now produces Ubertooth One, HackRF One, the Throwi...

This talk will focus on how Impostor Syndrome and the Dunning-Kruger effect work to undermine our estimation of our individual skills and ability to get things done. Who do these cognitive biases affect? And how do they collectively shape the way we interact with work and the world? The impact of these biases on personal and professional relationships among individuals and groups will be examined,...

If anyone can use open source software, who owns it? If noone has to pay for it, is development charity work? If you contribute code, how can you be sure you're not just giving your time to help someone else get rich? Legally, on the whole open source is great at the licensing end but very shaky at the ownership end. It's too easy for owners to exploit the contributions of others and very hard to...

The world around us can be understood as a complex bio-geo-chemical-socio-technical system that constantly evolves. The constant interaction between the individual, society and institutions on one side and the myriad of technologies on the other shape its past, present and future through a so called "coupled fitness landscape". Hackers are a vital part of this evolutionary process, exploring the s...

Although LEGO began as wooden toys back in 1932 it was the LEGO system, in 1958, that really cemented the toy as the devs favourite grown-up toy. In this talk we review some of the biggest, smallest, weirdest, and intriguing LEGO-related projects of recent times, including a working harpsichord, docking bay 94, a portrait of Tori Amos, a machine gun, and a Mindstorms Segway. about this event: http...

If your building an Amateur satellite the simple choice would be to assemble a device with all the latest satisfyingly advanced and complex tech. The $50SAT team made a decision to go against convention and produce a design with the minimum of components. $50SAT was the first of a new class of satellite pioneered by Professor Bob Twiggs; the PocketQubes, designed to be small and light so they woul...

Just days ago the Internet was inaccessible to thousands of BT customers. During the 2009 floods in Cumbria the emergency services could not communicate, even using their radios, because the cables carrying the Internet failed when the bridges collapsed. Amateur Radio operators practice state of the art wireless communication that does not rely on the Internet but can still link people and compute...

I will present a short talk on some of the more 'interesting' features of SMS and how you can use them with the Nexmo API on modern smartphones. Interactive session where users will send/receive messages on their phones so bring them along. about this event: https://www.emfcamp.org/schedule.frab

For a period of time which coincided suspiciously closely with the Cold War, Europe's shortwave spectrum was full of mysterious radio stations which broadcast inscrutable strings of numbers, noises and tones. This talk examines the history of the Numbers Stations and theories of what they might have been up to, using evocative archive recordings and a section where you can try your hand at decrypt...

CANUTE, an open source multi-line refreshable Braille display. The project has been developed using Bristol Hackspace as a base and workshop facility. We are a Not For Profit venture and are working on open sourcing the project because having an open source design and data protocol will open up the avenues to information and equipment it can link into and information it can display. Available disp...

A comedy set analysing the technology and interfaces shown in movies and explaining, using research, why they are all suck. about this event: https://www.emfcamp.org/schedule.frab

A fun romp between my failed PhD in theoretical physics on the topic of string theory, my life long commitment to yarn art and how this inspires my music and my love for the Karplus-Strong algorithm that is used to simulate string instruments. It ends with a insight in how our tonal system is tied to to the vibrating string and how to cut loose when the string is no longer a guide, but a gordic kn...

Have you ever felt your technology was inferior to a pinecone? I'll discuss a few awesome feats achieved by natural materials, such as plants that launch their seeds ballistically, snapping venus flytraps, sea cucumbers which go solid when you pick them up, and bivalve muscles that just don't quit. Some underlying concepts from how these work will be drawn out and explained, and I'll highlight att...

We'd like to present a wearable color organ dress (basically a LED-phonometer) and talk about how it was made from sewing to programming. Hardware is an Adafruit Gemma, 22 neopixels and a microphone. Moko would present the dress on stage and give a how to on sewing the dress and attaching the neopixels, including the problems we ran into, zakx would explain the programming. about this event: https...

Web Bluetooth is a brand new technology that allows your Web Browser to talk to Low Energy Bluetooth devices using JavaScript. In this session Dan covers all things Web Bluetooth, how it can be applied to the Physical Web: from connecting to BLE devices and controlling physical toys with your browser through to heart-rate monitors and other standards based devices. The limitations of the Web are s...

I am a mathematician (working mostly in three-dimensional geometry and topology) and mathematical artist (working mostly in 3D printing). I'll talk about some 3D prints I designed to help try to visualise four-dimensional objects. Just as a shadow of a three-dimensional object squishes it into the two-dimensional plane, we can squish a four-dimensional shape into three-dimensional space, where we...

During the last 8 years, many Free Software implementations of mobile communications protocol stacks and network elements have been developed within the Osmocom.org community: This includes Cellular systems from GSM via GPRS to UMTS, just like Professional Mobile radio like TETRA or even satellite interception of Thuraya/GMR. Osmocom is also the home of the rtl-sdr project, paving the way to ultra...

I will talk about what we have learned from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, including the discovery of the Higgs boson and latest exciting developments. about this event: https://www.emfcamp.org/schedule.frab

We would like to give talk and live demo of 'Off Grid', a stealth game about a mishap antihero who falls into the world of hacking. Off Grid forgoes weapons in favour of ingenuity, resourcefulness, and problem solving with gameplay utilising unique mechanics that allow you to manipulate the world and people around you with the data they unwittingly leave behind. The contemporary storyline follows...

How might you re-order wagons in trains without lifting them off the tracks or prevent trains from colliding when you cannot see where they are? What does a train travelling through a station indicate about simultaneous events and how do railway junctions lead to problems in ethics? This talk combines several interesting problems in railway operation, within the context of real railway operations,...