Chaos Computer Club - recent events feed (low quality)

My husband and I have been together for 19 years, since meeting at university. We’re opposites in many ways but have somehow made it work. He loves salt popcorn, I prefer sweet. He enjoys plays, I love musicals. He’s a technologist; I’m far more analogue and would happily turn a bathroom light on without an app. Yet we now live in a home with more than 200 sensors, automations and connected device...

A few years back we came up with the concept of a reusable event badge, and built the Tildagon. I'd like to tell you how it came to be, and walk you through the electronic, mechanical, and visual design for 2024 and 2026 and the reasoning behind the various decisions we had to make along the way. We'll go through the schematic, layout, and part selection, and hopefully some of the weirder decision...

Have you ever gotten a call from a relay operator who wants to connect you with someone who's using a text phone? Did you hang up? Stop it! I want to tell you about the past, present, and future of textphones, and how deaf people and people with difficulty speaking communicate with phone users. Finally, I want you to stop hanging up on me! Let's look at the systems behind different assistive techn...

Learn about the fascinating and fun world of computer networks and the Internet - with no previous knowledge required. Have you ever wondered how the Internet works? Or computer networks in general? Have you tried learning this in the past, but found it too confusing or intimidating? Then this talk might be for you. We will start with a walkthrough of how data crosses your home network. Building o...

Do we decide if we can play an instrument before we've even seen it? How much of our self-belief about our musicianship is based on adverse childhood experiences with cheap conventional instruments? How can we break through this barrier and rediscover the joy of noise, sound and musical play by shifting the idea of what constitutes a musical instrument? Join us as we explore new ways of making mus...

James Bond would have been a better spy if he were female. I've broken into dozens of buildings, from banks and museums to law firms and medical institutions. Using social engineering techniques, I've gained access to restricted areas, connected to internal networks, and even walked away with company devices, all by exploiting assumptions people make, often simply because I'm a woman. I'm no crimi...

The Windows 365 Link is a thin client, running a special edition of Windows 11, that can only connect to a "Windows 365 Cloud PC" and is otherwise useless ewaste. When it was announced, Microsoft boasted its total vendor lock-in plan, which they described as "secure-by-design architecture": no admin rights, no local data, EFI Secure Boot locked on, BitLocker always enabled. The last time EFI Secur...

For most bird-watchers, the fun part is watching birds in their natural habitat. For me it's all about the large-scale collection, analysis and visual representation of bird-song. In this talk I'll show you what inspired this project: visually representing the complexity and beauty of bird-song. We'll start with the slightly janky hardware I built to collect the audio then move on to the processin...

This talk, from a space telescope electronics engineer, looks at the background of some earth observation and astronomy missions and dives into the technology behind them. Looking at real flight hardware developed at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Harwell, I’ll discuss the importance of thermometry, how we measure incredibly accurate temperature from orbit, and how we know that these measur...

Both the Sun and Jupiter and strong radio noise sources, and can be detected with fair simple radios. I'll describe how I hacked the badge to control a simple radio, while predicting if the Sun or Jupiter are in the sky and recording a portion of the radio spectrum to detect radio emissions from Jupiter's magnetosphere. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ a...

Unlike most adults, I play videogames professionally with children online all day, every day. I play the games children love, such as Roblox and Fortnite, many of which parents are not interested in - either giving their children total freedom with them or banning them entirely. I will immerse adults in my world for 30 minutes and give them confidence in navigating parenting in this modern age. In...

This talk explores the emerging concept of “An Internet for the Solar System” — a networked approach to interplanetary communication that could transform how spacecraft, habitats, and missions share data beyond Earth. Starting with NASA’s LunaNet initiative, we will examine how principles from terrestrial internet infrastructure are being adapted for the unique challenges of space: extreme latency...

Astronomical observations show that our universe is expanding faster and faster in all directions due to something we call ‘dark energy’ – but what exactly is it? There are many theories out there, and astrophysicists have an unlikely ally in the search – atomic physicists like myself. As part of my PhD research, I used lasers to trap and cool atoms to use as tiny sensors to search for new physics...

Why are Irish number plates so much longer than British ones, despite the population being much smaller? What letters can you use on a Greek number plate? How do you drive a Japanese-registered car abroad, when the number plate is full of kanji and kana? Why do some people give Belgian cars with five-character plates a wide berth? Are those supercars with Arabic number plates you see in West Londo...

Imagine a world where were stronger. Imagine how much easier your life would be… how many fewer trips you would have spent lugging your camping equipment across the EMF carpark for a start! This talk could help make that world into your reality, and sooner than you think. In this talk I will outline my own journey from the girl picked last in sports to the woman deadlifting her bodyweight - which...

Content warning: Contains frank conversations about death Death is inevitable, yet our digital infrastructure remains woefully unprepared for it. While traditional "Letters of Wishes" provide a static roadmap for executors, they lack the agency to interact with our complex, data-driven lives. This workshop introduces the concept of the Machine-Readable Letter of Wishes: a framework for post-mortem...

Six years ago, I was an artist with no engineering qualifications, no formal technical training, and absolutely no business operating industrial robots worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Today, I lead robotics projects for companies around the world. This talk is a light-hearted cautionary tale of how curiosity, persistence, and an unhealthy number of browser tabs completely changed the direct...

(Alt title - Look at this Graph: How to make Visualisations to be Proud of) You probably encounter at least one data visualisation every day - whether that's in the news, in your own projects, or just scrolling through r/dataisugly. But what makes a visualisation good or bad? Data visualisation lets us leverage the powerful parallel processing abilities of our visual cognition system to understand...

Join a selection of EMF speakers and special guests for an extravaganza of variousness! Featuring: - Zoe Griffiths (maths compere extraordinaire) - Colin Wright (mathematician and juggler, breaking down the maths of juggling) - Rohin Francis (cardiologist and YouTuber, talking medical jargon) - Lauren Beukes (award-winning sci-fi author, reading a short story) - Neil Monteiro (space scientist and...

With the UK National Cyber Security Centre aiming for organisations to complete post-quantum cryptography (PQC) planning by 2028, and Google setting sights for a 2029 PQC migration timeline, the quantum future is no longer theoretical. This talk will bring you on a journey to understanding the mathematics behind today's encryption, how quantum computing threatens it, why data stolen today could be...

This time is reserved for Lightning Talks - signup details to be published soon. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ about this event: https://www.emfcamp.org/schedule/2026/376-lightning-talks

A deep dive into the history and technical innovations that have facilitated the (usually) speedy transit of millions of daily passengers across London. We begin with a short history of the network, cover the differences required for tunnel based signalling under a bustling capital, explore some amazing inventions to handle rising passenger demand, and finish with the current state of communicatio...

QR Codes! They're everywhere, and after this talk you'll see them everywhere. They've invaded every part of modern life - but how did they get there? (Have they always been here, in secret?) This talk will cover the history of scanning things that contain information such as the barcode, covering not just one but TWO whole dimensions of scanning. Where was the first barcode (spoilers, it involves...

Bingo meets Tech meets Comedy. An interactive, smartphone powered comedy act like no other, fun for ages 8 to 8000. Experience a whole new side of bingo created by Foxdog Studios (Lloyd & Pete) and their robotic bingo mascot, Mr Bing. Expect chaos, games and laughs. Join the fun without leaving your seat as bingo cards are beamed to your phone using their own homemade software and play with their...

As AI systems are getting smarter, safety researchers are increasingly concerned by a new capability of these models - they are getting very good at lying. This behaviour is seen both in and out of evaluation settings, and has a fascinating range of root causes. In this talk, we'll investigate the phenomena of AI deception across a broad range of scenarios. Discover how chatbots lie for your own g...