The rest were less good for me personally. Either over-dramatic and shallow (with a sexy-sounding topic) or too procedural in topics I'm not an expert in.
The Deutschlandticket talk was pretty cool. As Malcolm Tucker would say, "what a catastrofuck".
Miele washing machine hacking, very nice, I was going to say I'd be waiting to see someone integrate it into HA... and then looked up the Github repo and there's HA integration already there.
One interesting detail: In previous years, Joscha Bach gave a talk on AI, consciousness, and related topics (see e.g. [0]). A similar talk was planned for this year as well, but after emails between him and Epstein were made public (see his comment on this in [1]), his talk was canceled. Instead, there appears to have been an event that critically addressed the situation [2]. Unfortunately it was not recorded. Did anyone attend? A discussion between Joscha and his critics would have been really interesting.
I haven't seen all of them (which I wanted to see) yet, I had a lot of fun with various talks. Thus far, my favourite one was hands down [1], and I can explain why. I am not at all good with hardware, nor hardware designing i.e. I'm not the target audience for this talk.
However, the talk was beautiful. It went quick, was informative, good slides, very respectful Q&A (comms and quality-wise), and it had a message of DIY _and_ inspiring hope. It is easy to criticize X or say we need to do better with Y. These guys are doing it, and their journey and findings is completely open source (even though there was substantial financial risk involved). The hacker spirit 101.
Unfortunately, the congress is getting worse and worse every year. There are fewer and fewer interesting and technical topics. "It used to be better" moment.
What would be strange are hackers that are fascist. Fascism demands surrender to power and obedience, which is antithetical to the hacker sprit. Questioning systems, equalizing power imbalances is the hacker spirit.
Fighting fascism is required of every person who wants to keep a working democracy, regardless of your fiscal policy ideas or how egoistical you want your government to represent you.
Democracy is what allows you to remove bad leaders/parties without having to fight a bloody revolution. Fascism yearns to remove that possibility. Hence anti-fascism being needed.
That being said: Which part of the talk did you find especially extremist?
This "anti-fascism" talk sounds all nice and noble. But we all know that actual left-wing extremists have taken over the term now and most members are terrorist-adjacent. The irony is that antifa and other such "anti-fascists" are way more fascistic than their hypothetical and currently non-existent "fascists".
> The irony is that antifa and other such "anti-fascists" are way more fascistic than their hypothetical and currently non-existent "fascists".
Ah yes, the non-existent fascists that:
1. Marched openly as neo-Nazis in Charlottesville (2017), chanting "Jews will not replace us," resulting in the murder of Heather Heyer
2. Organize under explicitly fascist banners like Atomwaffen Division, The Base, Patriot Front, Blood Tribe, Golden Dawn, CasaPound, etc., all of which self-describe using fascist or Nazi ideology
3. Attempted to overturn a democratic election on Jan 6, 2021, including coordinated efforts by elected officials to submit fake electors and pressure state officials to "find" votes
4. Advocate ethno-states and mass deportations, including prominent figures calling for the removal of citizenship, voting rights, or legal protections from minorities (see CPAC speeches, "remigration" rhetoric in Europe, AfD platform language)
5. Celebrate or inspire political violence, from the Christchurch, El Paso, Buffalo, Halle, and Oslo attackers, all of whom explicitly cited fascist or white supremacist ideology in their manifestos
6. Promote leader-worship and elimination of dissent, e.g. calls to jail journalists, dissolve independent courts, criminalize opposition parties, or rule "by decree" (explicit in Hungary, echoed rhetorically elsewhere)
7. Attack independent media and academia as enemies of the nation, while advocating state control or punishment for ideological non-compliance
8. Receive normalization or support from sitting politicians, including endorsement, retweets, pardons, or refusal to condemn clearly fascist groups when given the opportunity
Calling this non-existent requires either ignoring explicit self-identification or redefining fascism so narrowly that only a 1930s uniform and a written and signed oath counts. But that definition isn't what any serious person would dare to bring to a discussion.
Meanwhile, "antifa" is not a party, not a centralized organization, has no manifesto, no leadership, no unified program, and no plausible path to state power. Are there idiots who claim the label antifa? Sure. But there are idiots in literally every subset of the population. Conflating street-level illiberal behavior with an actual authoritarian nationalist movement collapses basic political distinctions however.
22 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 57.7 ms ] threadCory Doctorow's talk is quite strong.
I attended 7 talks.
My favourite talk by far was hacking the GPG. Brilliant, really: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-to-sign-or-not-to-sign-practical...
The "In-house electronics manufacturing from scratch" was a very inspiring talk: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-in-house-electronics-manufacturi...
The rest were less good for me personally. Either over-dramatic and shallow (with a sexy-sounding topic) or too procedural in topics I'm not an expert in.
Miele washing machine hacking, very nice, I was going to say I'd be waiting to see someone integrate it into HA... and then looked up the Github repo and there's HA integration already there.
[0] https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-self-models-of-loving-grace
[1] https://joscha.substack.com/p/on-the-jeffrey-epstein-affair
[2] https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/hub/en/event/detail/tech...
Bluetooth Headphone Jacking: A Key to Your Phone [video]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46453204
Hacking Washing Machines [video]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46428496
Escaping containment: A security analysis of FreeBSD jails [video]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46436828
All my Deutschlandtickets gone: Fraud at an industrial scale [video]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46411930
However, the talk was beautiful. It went quick, was informative, good slides, very respectful Q&A (comms and quality-wise), and it had a message of DIY _and_ inspiring hope. It is easy to criticize X or say we need to do better with Y. These guys are doing it, and their journey and findings is completely open source (even though there was substantial financial risk involved). The hacker spirit 101.
[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-in-house-electronics-manufacturi...
PS: HN sucks with dupes.
I'm looking forward to watching "Who cares about the Baltic Jammer?" and "The art of text (rendering)" as examples of the former.
An example of the latter is "selbstverständlich antifaschistisch!"
What would be strange are hackers that are fascist. Fascism demands surrender to power and obedience, which is antithetical to the hacker sprit. Questioning systems, equalizing power imbalances is the hacker spirit.
Fighting fascism is required of every person who wants to keep a working democracy, regardless of your fiscal policy ideas or how egoistical you want your government to represent you.
Democracy is what allows you to remove bad leaders/parties without having to fight a bloody revolution. Fascism yearns to remove that possibility. Hence anti-fascism being needed.
That being said: Which part of the talk did you find especially extremist?
Ah yes, the non-existent fascists that:
1. Marched openly as neo-Nazis in Charlottesville (2017), chanting "Jews will not replace us," resulting in the murder of Heather Heyer
2. Organize under explicitly fascist banners like Atomwaffen Division, The Base, Patriot Front, Blood Tribe, Golden Dawn, CasaPound, etc., all of which self-describe using fascist or Nazi ideology
3. Attempted to overturn a democratic election on Jan 6, 2021, including coordinated efforts by elected officials to submit fake electors and pressure state officials to "find" votes
4. Advocate ethno-states and mass deportations, including prominent figures calling for the removal of citizenship, voting rights, or legal protections from minorities (see CPAC speeches, "remigration" rhetoric in Europe, AfD platform language)
5. Celebrate or inspire political violence, from the Christchurch, El Paso, Buffalo, Halle, and Oslo attackers, all of whom explicitly cited fascist or white supremacist ideology in their manifestos
6. Promote leader-worship and elimination of dissent, e.g. calls to jail journalists, dissolve independent courts, criminalize opposition parties, or rule "by decree" (explicit in Hungary, echoed rhetorically elsewhere)
7. Attack independent media and academia as enemies of the nation, while advocating state control or punishment for ideological non-compliance
8. Receive normalization or support from sitting politicians, including endorsement, retweets, pardons, or refusal to condemn clearly fascist groups when given the opportunity
Calling this non-existent requires either ignoring explicit self-identification or redefining fascism so narrowly that only a 1930s uniform and a written and signed oath counts. But that definition isn't what any serious person would dare to bring to a discussion.
Meanwhile, "antifa" is not a party, not a centralized organization, has no manifesto, no leadership, no unified program, and no plausible path to state power. Are there idiots who claim the label antifa? Sure. But there are idiots in literally every subset of the population. Conflating street-level illiberal behavior with an actual authoritarian nationalist movement collapses basic political distinctions however.