I have to write a few words about the 22C3 which just came to an end. This was the first congress without having my laptop with me. I decided to see as many lectures as I could and therefor I didn’t want to walk around with a 17″ Powerbook in my hand. It worked pretty well compared to last year where I got really exhausted by running around with a heavy backpack all day long. So I saw a lot of lectures of which some were really inspiring. A positive surprise was the lecture by Jacob Appelbaum who talked about his experiences in Iraq and New Orleans (Personal experiences bringing technology and new media to disaster areas). He showed a lot of pictures and gave personal impressions on the situations he encountered. His voice was filled with bitterness and the audience was truly impressed by that. Since all the lectures are available as video files and video streams you can watch his talk from your computer. Jacob also enjoyed the 22C3, in fact he claimed in his weblog that it was the best conference he attended so far. In other words – he seemed to like it a lot.

Another person who seemed to like it a lot was Bert Bos. We met and talked on all of the four days. It was really good to have him in Berlin. His first talk was really interesting because it was about the upcoming standards of W3C and people followed his words closely. The second talk was about the W3C in general. It was early and not very crowded. I think it would have been better to give him two hours for one talk so the main part could have been about the standards and the end would have been about the consortium itself and how one could get involved. I hope he comes back next year so we can figure something out. Concerning the other lectures about the web … I was really disappointed about the Ajax / Javascript talks, I think because there was nothing new in it for me. Anyway, he was telling me that he never was at a conference like this, he stayed the whole four days until the last event ended. Somehow I knew from the early emails that he would fit in.

Bluetooth hacking, XBox hacking and Infrared Hacking were also memorable talks. Mostly for entertaining reasons but they also reminded people to question technology, even if it’s decades old.

Another highlight for me was Eric Blossoms talk on how to build you own radar as well as the talk about magnetic stripe technology.

Of course there were a lot more lectures but at this point I can’t point out every one of them. Maybe in future posts. I really enjoyed this conference. I enjoyed the people, the information, the inspiration and the atmosphere. See you again in 2006!

I guess you can find more impressions and feedback via technorati and flickr.

The proceedings of the 22C3 are available here. A complete list of the videos will be announced on the 22C3 weblog.