The Chaos Communications Congress ^[1] starts up just after Christmas. Although it’s nominally a computer security conference, many of the talks range more broadly into politics, art and society. It brings to Berlin hundreds of geeks, generally smart, idealistic and anti-authoritarian, and brimming with innovative projects.

Talks that caught my eye:

• Hacker Spaces ^[2]: “places for people, tools, and Club-Mate”. Berlin already has an impressive assortment of communal work-spaces, play-spaces and living-spaces. There’s always room for more ideas, though, and for inspiration from the dozens of ‘hacker spaces’ in other cities
• Wikileaks ^[3] is one of the most stunningly successful projects around – in the last year, the whistleblowers’ website has, among other things, “publicly revealed more sensitive military documents than the entire world’s press combined”. They’re doing an incredible job of breaking open government secrecy, and I’d love to hear more about how they’ve pulled it off
• Of the purely technical talks, Dan Kaminsky’s ^[4] is likely to be one of the most interesting. Dan has built up quite a reputation for finding security holes in the infrastructure of the internet. He’ll be talking about the major vulnerability ^[5] in the DNS system, which he found earlier in the year

If the €80 price-tag is too much, at least pop into the after-parties at C-Base ^[6], the nerd refuge built in the wreckage of a ‘crashed space-station’ by Jannowitzbrücke.