Chaos Computer Club - archive feed

Everything we see in the Universe makes up only a paltry 4% of the total sum. The rest is ‘dark’ – we know remarkably little about it other than what we call ‘Dark Energy’ is causing the expansion of the Universe to accelerate, and ‘Dark Matter’ is holding galaxies like our own Milky Way together. Scientists think that Dark Matter is everywhere, streaming through you as you read this right now! Un...

When I learned the news that I had somewhat accidentally become the owner of a Decommissioned, 12 Storey High, Late Soviet Era, Water Tower in Latvia: naturally my first question was 'Could I use it to prop up a Buran?' (The USSR's equivalent of the US Space Shuttle)... and If I'd have asked that question to Woking District council, then I'm guessing the answer would be a list of regulations that...

Everyone's familiar with the science fiction scenarios of "AI gone wrong", but what's the reality of the situation? This talk introduces AI Safety, a field of research which analyses the actual problems we're likely to face with powerful AI systems, and tries to find technical solutions to them, so we can ensure that artificial general intelligence is safe and beneficial for humanity. Everyone's f...

Ever wondered how the chips in your electronic devices are designed and fabricated? This talk looks at chip fabrication technologies, the process of designing, vaildating and testing analog, digital and mixed-signal chips. Several chip design projects the speaker has worked on, including prototype miniaturised capsules for fluorescence and ultrasound imaging within the human intestine, are also co...

Imogen Heap's MI.MU glove is a gesture based midi instrument. The prototypes have been used by artists across the world including megastar Ariana Grande. Earlier this year Imogen and I met to talk about how inspire the next generation of creative technologists and the result was the Mini. Mu, a glove kit that gets children sewing, wiring, coding and playing a gesture based instrument. In my talk I...

The internet began as a network before firewalls, where any computer could communicate with any other computer without intermediation; but today there are host firewalls, perimeter firewalls, content filters, NATs, DNS limitations, BGP hijacks and all manner of other mechanisms which limit you and your computer's ability to communicate — and what is a network if not for communication? The Tor "Oni...

This talk will discuss getting started with 1) wearable fashion technology, 2) engineering of human organs and 3) why i choose to do both. This talk will discuss getting started with 1) wearable fashion technology, 2) engineering of human organs and 3) why i choose to do both. about this event: https://c3voc.de

Codes of Ethics are back in fashion - mostly driven by AI and other scary technology. What's in a code of ethics, and why should you care about it? Go behind the scenes with an ethicist and co-author of the Association of Computing Machinery's (ACM) new code of ethics that affects hundreds of thousands of computing professionals and get some answers to the following: What is a Code of Ethics? Why...

News and media outlets on the web are silos of information designed to be taken at face value and are resistant to aggregation and side-by-side analysis because - after all - they're really just vehicles to sell ads. Where aggregation is available to the average user (usually on social media), news feeds are customized on behalf of the user with algorithms they can't understand or control. To try...

Governments and organisations the world over are releasing free LiDAR data - capturing the globe in 3D down to the metre. But how can you take this data and make into something tangible? And how can you do it at both the small scale of cities and the enormous scale of mountain ranges? We'll look at three different methods of making 3D terrain models via both 3D printing and CNC machining - examini...

During my PhD, I spent my free time building an InMoov, which is a life-size 3D printed humanoid robot. I tweaked the original designs a bit to make it run on the Robot Operating System (ROS) and added a powered wheelchair base to give it mobility. Kermit, as it was named by the first human who saw it, now lives in fizzPOP in Birmingham and aspires to be the world's first 3D printed robot butler*....

A talk explaining how and why I built an undertent heating system, and possible future improvements, with jokes, based on my 2017 Edinburgh show "Renegade Plumber" A talk explaining how and why I built an undertent heating system, and possible future improvements, with jokes, based on my 2017 Edinburgh show "Renegade Plumber" about this event: https://c3voc.de

A comprehensive description of good and bad ciders from a technical, simple flavour chemistry, and hardware viewpoint. What different apples do for the taste of a cider, what goes into a real cider, how real cider is made, and then by contrast how cheap cider is made. This talk is based upon four decades of cider making experience growing up on a British small farm. A comprehensive description of...

A personal account of getting involved in the recreation at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park of EDSAC. This was the first fully programmable general purpose computer built from 1946 to 1949 at Cambridge University. It has 3000 valves and takes 12kW of power. I am on the commissioning team finding how difficult it is to use valves (tubes) as logic circuits. You can find out more h...

The past few years have seen a cascade of headlines about sex robots. It's a shame these are generally completely inaccurate, as behind them there are fascinating stories of intimacy and technology, computers and psychology. Throw in some science-fiction utopias and dystopias, loneliness and companionship, law and ethics, privacy and community and there is so much to be learned about our future wi...

HiTag2 is an RFID technology operating at 125KHz. It is distinguished from many others in the same field by its use of 2-way communications for authentication and its use of encryption to protect the data transmissions - the majority of RFID technologies at 125KHz feature no authentication or encryption at all. As a result it has been widely used to provide secure building access and has also been...

This year we lost Ursula K Le Guin, a writer whose work began to shape my worldview when I first read her Earthsea books as a child. Here I attempt to pay tribute to the many ways Le Guin's work continued to change my life and discuss with examples how her writing has challenged and informed me as a reader, writer, scholar and activist, how she used the tools of science fiction and fantasy to grea...

Quick <10min talks, on anything, from anybody who would like to get on the stage! If you'd like to give a lightning talk, please email lightning@emfcamp.org, or try your luck and show up to a session. about this event: https://c3voc.de

Everybody loves blinky LEDs, but what do you do with them once you've got them to not catch fire? A veteran LED addict presents a selection of tips, tricks, and cheats (oh god so many cheats) for getting your project to, well, shine. - LED types (RGB, RGBW, RGBWW, WWA, WTF?) - Getting away with the bare minimum (six sine waves and a bitmap) - Gamma correction, why and how? - Easing functions - Opt...

Köln gehört zu den wenigen deutschen Städten, in denen eine sehr aktive Stadtwerke-Tochter schon früh und großflächig mit dem Glasfaserausbau begonnen hat. Seit 2006 legt NetCologne Glasfaserleitungen direkt in die Keller ihrer Kunden (Fibre to the Building, FTTB) und stellt dort kompakte VDSL2-DSLAMs auf. Über die existierende Haus-Telefonverkabelung werden bis zu 100 Mbit/s symmetrisch per VDSL...

Eigentlich ist das Internet ein von Grund auf dezentrales Netzwerk, ohne kritische, zentrale Punkte. Dadurch entsteht ein ausfallsicheres Netz, das auch bei Teilausfällen weiter zuverlässig arbeiten kann. Viele klassische Dienste im Internet, wie E-Mail oder DNS, sind ebenfalls dezentral organisiert, und damit nicht auf einen Anbieter oder Konzern angewiesen. Doch fast alle sozialen Medien sind ze...

What we see in the modern data store world is a race between different approaches to achieve a distributed and resilient storage of data. Most applications need a stateful layer which holds the data. There are at least three necessary ingredients which are everything else than trivial to combine and of course even more challenging when heading for an acceptable performance. Over the past years the...

Mit Domain Driven Design lässt sich das Micro in Microservices besser eingrenzen. Mit Bounded Context und Self Contained Systems erhält man besser geschnittene und verständlichere Komponenten. Domain Driven Design ist eine Entwicklungs- und Modellierungsstrategie, welche von Eric Evans bereits vor einigen Jahren postuliert wurde. Der Kern von Domain Driven Design bildet dabei die eigentliche Fachd...

Seit jeher obliegt es Ärzten, die für ihre Patienten geeignete Behandlung aus einer Reihe von Optionen zu finden. In Zeiten von interdisziplinärer Biomedizin, eHealth und Data Science benötigen Mediziner mehr denn je breit angelegte Unterstützung um gezielt Entscheidungen im Sinne des Patienten zu treffen. Hierfür ist es nicht nur wichtig, von Anfang an gegen den Eindruck einer digitalen Bevormund...

IT meets Law – Eine rechtliche Reise durch die IT-Infrastruktur mit allen Unebenheiten Viele Menschen verbinden mit dem Stichwort „IT“ Begriffe wie Computer, Software, Hardware, Nerds und einiges mehr. Was jedoch selten bis nie genannt wird sind rechtliche Aspekte. Wenn diese doch genannt werden, dann häufig im Kontext Abmahnungen und Lizenzen. Der alltägliche Betrieb einer IT-Infrastruktur wird j...