I've been watching the live streams since 25c3. First of all, it's a great thing there are so many volunteers make such a big conference possible. Since the 4 years the c3 was a highlight in the year for me. But I have to say I was a bit disappointed this time. I don't know why exactly, but it seems to shift focus. The 3rd talk about osmocom is not that exciting, so is the n-th about hacking outdated wireless smartcards. Yes, electro mechanical instruments are fun, but I haven't seen much new and not a single line of code.
There was quite a lot of dissent about 29c3 primarily because it moved. I think that is also the reason the schedule suffered, so hopefully it's just temporary. Here's Harald Welte discussing why he didn't participate this year: http://laforge.gnumonks.org/weblog/2012/12/18/#20121218-29c3
Probably it is the congress. ( At least I heard a few times that the congress should be more technical.) But on the other hand, the CCC becomes more and more visible in German politics. ( As the default experts for anything computer and 'cyber' related.) So I believe it is only logical that the congress also becomes more political.
I second "writing a thumbdrive from scratch"! There's much more to it than it sounds like. Travis talks for example about the possiblity of the drive being able to fingerprint the system it's mounted on, recognizing it's 'home' machine. From there he suggest counter measures like recognizing an indexing process by the read patterns and have the drive erase itself, or giving a different checksum every time the content is hashed.
Really? I watched that one (I was there...), and I found it absolutely uninformative. Just two whistleblowers and their lawyer, but not really anything new and or at least a good story. And one of them seemed bitter because his better surveillance system wasn't being used. I was also a bit confused about the audience clapping for basically nothing.
This was probably the most practical explanation of what's involved in setting up a microprobe workstation that I've seen. Not a ton of depth, but interesting.
- Writing a Thumbdrive from Scratch
Starts with a good premise and goes into sufficient detail to be interesting.
- FactHacks
Best vaguely mathy talk. For some reason, I'm always surprised when I see video of djb -- he is a very good lecturer.
The parent (hah) is exactly why I should read child comments before thinking too hard. I spent a few moments trying to figure out what was said there, or what language it might've been, before I read this comment. Glad to hear you're starting them on HN early!
How best should I extract the audio so I can listen to these as a podcast on my mp3 player? More specifically, I have an iPod with 20 GB of space, of which 4 is free. This is enough for a couple of videos, but it doesn't want to play the .mp4 file, and I would rather have a dozen audio recordings than one video one.
For those cases where I need to see the video in order to better understand the talk, I'll watch it on my lap/desktop.
It's really nice that the final schedule is available in XML form. It was easy to pull out the various fields so that the RSS contains title, subtitle, description, dates, etc. I put my export script at http://dalkescientific.com/ccc_rss.py . "Share and enjoy" - I assert no copyright interest for it.
Both of these will be there for a couple of weeks, but they will disappear at some arbitrary point in the future.
Maybe it's me, maybe it's the congress.