A 33C3 watch-list

Last December the Chaos Computer Club held the 33rd Chaos Communication Congress (33C3). It is a rare occasion to hear about cryptography, ergonomics, protocols, architecture, politics, and many more, in a single event.

All recordings are available online and most of the talks I'm recommending here are accessible to regular people - this is not an academic conference. Sometimes the downloadable video includes French or German overdubs and/or subtitles. Of course I did not have time to watch everything, but could catch more than a dozen... and here are my favorites.

The scary

Sometimes the presentation sound like a spying movie plot:

The global assassination grid - "We will have autonomous killer robots in the next five years". Although the speaker is not at ease, and this is not about computer security, if you'd ask me to pick only one talk this would be my choice. I suggest you jump directly to 15:00 and skip the questions at the end.

Million Dollar Dissidents and the Rest of Us - The examples in this talk (presented à la Fred & Jamy) shows how much some governments are ready to invest to spy on unwanted activists. Much more elitist that the fishing we all get.

Recount 2016: An Uninvited Security Audit of the U.S. Presidential Election - A saga around the latest American election and a useful reminder that voting machines are far from helping democracies.

The fun

Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? - A talk about travel booking systems and the burden of their history. I'm told the presentation does not discuss enough the choices of international regulation, or booking systems' countermeasures, but it would put the fun out of it.

A data point walks into a bar - Short and good talk (don't stay for the questions) about the difference between a datum and data, and how you should play with it when presenting statistics. A must-watch for fellow data practitioners.

Exploiting PHP7 unserialize teaching a new dog old tricks - Back to basics, or how the speaker puts it: "while programming with a high-level language, you're still vulnerable to low-level bugs". This presentation will only make sense to people who ever encountered gdb.

The good to know

A world without blockchain - A talk explaining the very basics of money transfers between banks. Watch if you're curious about low-tech, accounting, and why banks are interested in Bitcoin (discussed at questions time).

Everything you always wanted to know about Certificate Transparency - I picked it because updating knowledge about TLS is as good as updating software. Learned by the way how Let's Encrypt and other authorities will log publicly the host/domain names they're certifying. Also learned the existence of Merkle Trees, which demonstrate that we don't need to put blockchains everywhere.

Many thanks to the speakers and organizers for sharing this !