Chaos Computer Club - archive feed

Throughout history, music has often been employed as a morale boosting device. From wartime rallying songs to football terraces to "If you're happy and you know it", we sing to encourage the troops; to celebrate epic victories; to cheer on our favourite team. Whose battles are more epic, whose victories more heroically won than global corporations with enough spare marketing budget to commission t...

Machine learning is now ubiquitous in modern society. It's often used to solve problems such as spam email detection, natural language translation, to find images matching certain search criteria, or to make music recommendations. This talk will turn the problem around and examine the extent to which neural networks can emulate human creativity. We'll start by thinking about what it means for an a...

Podcasting has been a quiet revolution. Most people didn't get it at first and some are still surprised it's not going away. But podcasting has not only survived three global hype cycles it's also one of the most resilient and unique media forms on the Internet. So far, Podcasting has successfully resisted being sucked up by a single YouTube-style platform that looks helpful in the beginning but w...

Tagline: "I almost wish there were a conspiracy, but I'm afraid it's much worse than that." It is a widely, but vaguely, appreciated fact that banks and banking are powerful and important aspects of modern history, which affect almost all aspects of politics and society. Most thoughtful people, reflecting on the present trajectory of history, get the uncomfortable feeling that we are all being dri...

As with many young people interested in computing, I could never work out how a computer could turn 1's and 0's flowing through logic gates into what you see before you. You learn that this magic box can be programmed to do all sorts of amazing things, but are never really given the details as to how it does it. I wanted to know more, and after some research I started making logic gates with the o...

Sequel for the EMF’16 talk on hacking modern automotive tech into a 1974 Ford Escort Mk1. An updated journey on; connecting the car to the cloud using AWS for GPS tracking and remote engine start, 3D printing prototype engine parts and reverse engineering CAN signals to test a home-brew digital cluster built using a Raspberry Pi running a custom Linux image. about this event: https://c3voc.de

Geiger counters are interesting and surprisingly useful devices, and you can build one for less than the price of a video game. They can monitor background radiation levels, check household items such as smoke alarms and gas mantles, and provide information about medical treatments. I designed and built my own unit having been diagnosed with cancer in 2017, and it has provided some fascinating ins...

Quick

Failure is a great teacher, but we do not often talk openly about failure in a public setting. As a scientist (and failure enthusiast), I am trying to encourage my community to talk more about failure, which is difficult since the path to success is to publish about successes and to hide failures. Let's do more to talk about failure as a Maker community. Let's be honest about the dead-ends and dum...

Matrix.org is an ambitious open source project which defines a new protocol for open, decentralised, encrypted communication: adding a common denominator to the internet for securely publishing and subscribing to data (especially IM and VoIP) in realtime; liberating communication from being trapped in silos like WhatsApp, Slack, Discord and similar. We maintain the specification for Matrix as well...

A almost entirely factually accurate comedy set about the difficulties of getting people to experiment on when you're studying pain and fear, covering how utterly essential volunteers/willing subjects are to all human science and the perils and pitfalls of studying cognition in small children and babies, (and how they’re much smarter than we think). about this event: https://c3voc.de

We were legally banned from using encryption on our computers, and were required to email the police every time we purchased a new computer, due to a “Serious Crime Prevention Order” lasting 5 years, which expired recently. Additionally, we had to email the police our exact whereabouts, and initially they tried to put in a condition that we had to send them a letter every time we used "the cloud"....

"It's not natural!" This phrase is often used to try and justify bigotry and prejudice, especially against people who are LGBTQIA+, polyamorous, or women who don't fit traditional gender roles. But is it true? What do we mean by "natural"? As a bisexual, polyamorous biologist and science presenter, Antonia Forster is keen to set the record straight (no pun intended). What behaviours do we see in n...

Furby is a cute little guy, but what exactly is going on beneath that lurid neon fluff? In this talk, we'll take you on a deep dive into IoT reverse engineering, walking you through the story of our work on the Furby Connect, and offering up a set of broadly-applicable reversing tips and approaches that you can try out against your favourite toy or embedded device. We'll also demonstrate live how...

A critically hopeful perspective on the magical technology of the 21st Century, Dr. Lydia Kostopoulos takes the listeners on a journey of how technology is transforming the human experience all the way from birth to death. Her talk unpacks the potential benefits and consequences of DNA Editing, Artificially Intelligent Companions, Brain Computer Interface, 3D Printing of Body Parts, and Whole Brai...

The show that works like magic to spell bind the audience, make them gasp, gape, wonder and laugh. Featuring all demonstrations, strange and wonderful noises, levitating objects, flash bang and big sparks and the occasional funny smell, all done with some fantastic and rare equipment. You won't believe your eyes. The show that works like magic to spell bind the audience, make them gasp, gape, wond...

An episode of the Bricolage Podcast, interviewing interesting people LIVE on stage. https://www.bricolage.run about this event: https://c3voc.de

This talk is about an Open Source robot version of me that I use instead of commuting. It uses web technologies and cheap, off the shelf hardware to give good quality audio and video, and also allows me to move around a bit. It's particularly good for small meetings where manifesting in a laptop or phone doesn't give me enough physical presence to participate fully. I'll run through the technologi...

Want to make a movie? Alia Sheikh did, putting together a team at Electromagnetic Field in 2014 to create ‘Tentman’. Tonight, before the premiere of her work, Alia discusses the skills and knowledge she acquired to get started in filmmaking and shares some anecdotes from the Tentman project. Want to make a movie? Alia Sheikh did, putting together a team at Electromagnetic Field in 2014 to create ‘...

In recent history, fish have been relatively untroubled by the Internet of Things, but it was time for that to change. Armed only with a soldering iron, a Raspberry Pi, some JavaScript and ideas above my station, I set about connecting my aquarium to the Internet. Soon, armed with delusions of grandeur, things inevitably spiralled about of control and now my garage door has an API. This talk is eq...

Smart connected lightbulbs are common, cheap, and come in a bewildering array of styles and functionality. Bulbs that change colour? Certainly. Bulbs that have a built in speaker? Yes. Bulbs that connect to a command and control network in a foreign state and potentially leak network security information? Of course. Come and learn what's actually inside one of these bulbs, what it does, whether it...

Opening Ceremony Opening Ceremony about this event: https://c3voc.de

There is a penis museum, but no vagina equivalent. There's only one way to change that: Make one. Join the Vagina Museum as they talk about why we need one, their experiences researching vaginas, vulvas and all parts related, what would go in a museum about the gynaecological anatomy and the wonderful and strange reactions encountered whilst making the world's first physical vagina museum. The mus...

Scratch is a popular language/IDE for teaching children to code. It is possible to extend the offline version of Scratch 2 with a Python module that communicates with Scratch via a web service. I have extended Scratch to control Midi instruments and Arduino projects, including controlling Lego Power Functions motors, having reverse engineered the infrared protocol they use. In addition, and perhap...

Advances in NLP and machine learning are allowing automatic processing of knowledge. An untapped potential of this revolution is the augmentation and possible automation of the invention process. Everyone has a perception of an inventor as a crazy guy in a shed who is somehow, suddenly inspired. I would like to challenge this view by exploring the process of famous historical inventors to present...