It’s already 6 in the morning, I can clearly feel my circadian cycle drifting again in the early hours of the day, but it’s not anymore a desesperate quest for sleep, I’m back to last winter when the quiet nights were the best moment to concentrate and build up.
Enough said, here are 3 important things you’ll have to see during this month, I can’t remember when was the last time I got so much great visual information!
Juno
Totally indie movie, about a 16 years old girl in US, who gets pregnant and decides to give her child. In a refreshing way, that’s the best solution for everybody, they’re all happy about it, and they take the difficulties with some geeky humour, I liked it so much!
Same country, same young woman lifetime. After 2 years, she’s getting her father out of a mental institute, she’s made her life alone during this time. Her father is still crazy, and he’s now looking for lost spanish gold buried somewhere in California. Epic quest and crazy relationship.
It’s not a movie, it’s the session I’ll remember the most from last summer CCC camp near Berlin. Paul Böhm, a founder of Metalab Vienna, shows new space for innovation actually growing up in Europe.
It particularly made me think about Las Indias, with the same philosophy inside, and in Vienna, they already have their centralized physical world with the metalab, a kind of super-growed hacking house for everybody, that I must go visit in 2008 :)
The issue with decentralizing my living place it’s really hard to be at the right place at the right time. As an example I missed the 24C3 conference in Berlin last week, which was replaced by Wii session, not too bad :)
Hopefully, all these lost moments tends to be more and more digitalized, so here are the conferences I found the most interesting so far:
What is terrorism?: a german woman speaking about the experience to see the police busting her house to take her boyfriend away, under the suspicion of terrorims, with various accounts about the intelligence methods in place to monitor her family and friends. Conclusion: keep your mobile phone switched on if you don’t want to be suspected as a terrorist. [mp3]
Hacking in the age of declining everything: a hacking environmentalist session, where everyhting on Earth seems to go to disaster, and how certain societies deal with it, or not. A climate-change speech, oriented to geek audience, with a great speaker. [mp3]
Design noir: Electronic engineering is easy enough today to provide some power to individual purpose: someone launches an idea like tv-be-gone, and anyone can modify it to his/her own benefit. Repeat the process to switch of your own external world annoyance. [mp3]
There are plenty more of conference I want to listen, mostly concerning Storm malware which made a big buzz during 2007. Here comes interesting links from 24C3 if you want to discover other interesting sessions:
Rebellious Communication and the Federal Flood: My experience and the role of bloggers, podcasters, and other rebellious net-based media sources in post Katrina New Orleans and the Gulf Coast
Sputnik: “test and play around with 2.4GHz RFID technology and to demonstrate the actual threats, problems and benefits of tracking and data mining”. The “play” thing is ringing in my head :)
Nearly 10 years ago, a teenager dream became a virtual reality: Back Orifice released by The Cult of The Dead Cow
Basicly, it was a small trojan horse with really simple commands to connect to infected computers on internet. All you needed is a range of ip - national ISP networks were working well - to scan for any open connection and start playing with it. Really useless, but so much fun :-)
Today, CCC has released a documentary about this piece of history:
Lawrence Lessig is the Free Culture star, and a great speaker, even more if your are looking for presentation inspiration.
This might be one of the greatest session I’ve watched yet from the 23C3
Chaos Computer Club is organizing one of these great hacking congress just kilometers away from my holiday paradise. The temptation to spend a wandering day there has reached a peak last night, but I’ll have a better time staying with Chris and getting numeric feedbacks (blogs, podcasts, …) from the show.
