A lot if not most of the talks will be recorded, yes.

Yes. They record almost every talk. You’ll find the relive (unedited recording of the live stream) on https://media.ccc.de and some time later the edited recording also on media.ccc.de and also on YouTube. There also also live translations to English (and some other languages) for talks in german.

Probably. In previous years there were streamdumps available immediately somewhere (though figuring out where took me usually a day or so) and a re-live version on media.ccc.de a bit later. (Usually hours, but from time to time a day or so.)

> but it starts at 4 AM for me.

It ends at 1am their time. The conference itself never stops there are people there around the clock. (I wish I could go!! I went to 28c3 in Berlin and 29c3 in Hamburg they were amazing)

> Ostriching doesn't seem productive.

But listening to pep talks of political opinions that are very opposite to yours does not seem productive, either.

that post made me worry more tbh :(

> Holy hell, I had missed that post

Here it is:

> http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=97cd29cd

> http://blog.fefe.de/?mon=202512

(note that https currently does not work).

The user had more arguments than just "it's all politics". What level of scrutiny does his statement have to hold up to? Because as far as I am concerned this is not here to find scientific truths.

There has been plenty of direct action in recent years, but I can't really think of any on a global scale. Lots of smaller things on a German level, like journalists reporting about infiltrating a Great Replacement conference hosted by the second biggest political party here.

That chernobyl and western politics is in any way connected is due to decades unscientific fearmongering. And Berlin has always been a hotbed for that.

But chernybyl isnt the only or primary reason.

Take this as example: https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2025/fahrplan/event/...

Definition of politics: whenever two agents have conflicting goals and a resolution is reached (peacefully or otherwise). Or more succinctly, multi-agent dynamics. Yes, almost everything is politics, and this is not diluting the word, any more than saying that almost everything is made of atoms is diluting the meaning of the word "atoms".

(Parent comment was edited to remove the part about diluting meaning)

> And it is not that inaccessible to non-US citizens. Sure, the current administration is not very welcoming, but it is easier than, say, Russia (where a lot of hackers also live) if you want to attract an international audience.

I would say that with the current US administration, it is similar hard to get to the USA as to Russia.

The difference rather is that in Europe's hacker scene there exist quite some people who, if they stated their opinions openly, would get in much worse trouble if they stated their opinion in Russia than in the USA (because in the USA these opinions are currently "more acceptable"). On the other hand, for Russian hackers likely the reverse holds: I can easily imagine that quite a lot of Russian hackers, if they stated their opinions in the USA, would attract quite a lot of trouble.

Just to be clear: I consider it to be quite plausible that in 5 years, the situation might be similarly bad in the USA as it is today in Russia.

Now, I could say a lot of things Russia is known for, but not for their rich hacker culture, lest it to be mentioned in the same context as USA. Russia simply isn't known for their large hacker culture; Europe is (since I want to include a member of FVEY, specifically a country which Brexited, and am also referring to a time when EU did not yet exist). A somewhat dark past of CCC is related to Russia via Eastern Germany by CCC member Hagbard (my nickname here related to it). Back in those days, the hacker culture very much was counterculture. KMFDM has a couple of good tracks about it.

CCC is German, and started in West-Germany. It is the oldest hacker conference. The second was USA (DEF CON), and the third was The Netherlands (theirs is approx every four years, and has a different name every year). The first one in NL was HeU 1993 (Hacking at the End of the Universe). This list excludes demoscene (IMO part of hacker culture due to reversing / cracking software, plus programmming and art in limited constraints, but at the very least it is related to); the first demoscene party was called Copy Party in Finland, 1980. Nordic countries are well represented in demoscene.

I am only aware of one person who fled USA to RU, and said person wasn't known in hacker culture before he did, plus he ended up there by mistake. By contrast, various people in infosec left USA for Europe. Jacob Applebaum went to Germany, Drew DeVault went to The Netherlands.

Since 2022, brain drain started in Russia due to the full scale invasion and war with Ukraine.

There's a very free country near the USA which does not have the ridiculous entry requirements the USA has. It even has a couple of large cities near the US border, including near cities with a rich hacker culture. Entry to said country is about as easy as entry to Germany. The country is called Canada. Yes, your neighbor.

May HOPE, DEF CON, and Black Hat end up in a tolerant, hacker-friendly country. I am not aware of brain drain due to Trump II. I mean, it is happening, but it also happened during Bush era, and the proportions I don't know about.

As for CCC being held in Germany. They have been very open to foreigners (as have us Dutch been), famous USA hackers were always welcome (and came) to hacker conferences in NL and DE. Talks in NL were almost all in English, at CCC partly (German is a relatively popular language in Europe). Nowadays, almost all German talks get dubbed and subbed. So CCC is very American-friendly, cause we Europeans get that Americans speak almost exclusively English only.

The problem has been the continuous purposeful rightward shift of the overton window as part of a wider strategy by the far right.

You see it in action here, where the politics of the CCC, despite not having changed since their founding are suddenly decried as "very far left". You see the far-right decrying our democratically elected government as "dictatorship", a classic Putinist propaganda move.

Don't let the right wing extremists set the narrative! Don't listen to their complaints about things being too "political" or "far left". It's all just a tactic in their march towards fascism.

> Your talk won't ever be on the Fahrplan if the topic isn't [...] "hooray, more EU dictatorship"

There is a talk on Chat Control though?..

> Congress has become a radical leftist politics playground.

I don't know which past Chaos Communication Congresses you have attended, but it always was. If that's not for you, then that's too bad.

> The one thing you cannot ever do is go to CCC and express any idea that isn't very far left. That is a very certain way to get thrown out.

Opinions that people get thrown out for are not "I love my country" or "hey, maybe immigration should be handled differently". They're things like "Hitler was ok, actually". And IMO if a conference doesn't throw you out for _that_, it's not one worth attending.

> Congress has become a radical leftist politics playground

Which is fucking based. Being a radical leftist should be normalized even more and people like you need to be driven out of _every_ fucking public space.

There is no radical left or radical right; there is only right and wrong! If you don’t understand human rights and realize that you are not the only person or creature on this planet, you need to change your point of view.

> HN uses "hacker" as in "the people who do the work that makes Y Combinator rich" rather than "someone who plays with technology"

I do believe that originally Y Combinator indeed did celebrate the people who play with technology, but I guess over the many years the focus has shifted.