Chaos Computer Club - archive feed

Placeholder for the first Lightning Talks session

about this event: https://c3voc.de

You put a bunch of scooters online and you have an app that can tell you if you're near one so you can hire it. But what can people do with that knowledge?

What can you figure out if you can track a scooter's position in real time? What insight do you have into businesses? And how do you do this in the first place?

This talk covers how to reverse engineer an app so you can obtain information yourself, poor design choices that allowed extraction of terrifying amounts of data, and a really cool picture that turns out to basically be a Chinese railway map but with extra steps.

about this event: https://c3voc.de

A few of us struggle with completing projects. They pile up, often literally. A multitude of unhelpful feelings follow. Project management tools help but never seem to address what really holds us back. We start a new project, and the pattern repeats.

You are invited to break this cycle.

Come gain a deeper awareness of what stands between you and the future-you who finishes what they start. Leave with an alternative perspective of space and time, some solid strategies for overcoming barriers, and the confidence that your next project will be different.

about this event: https://c3voc.de

What, exactly, does a gender transition involve?

Over time, it has increasingly become the case that there is no simple answer. The degree to which people can now pick and choose what they want in terms of (de)masculinizing and (de)feminizing effects/procedures is astonishing - even to many transgender people and medical professionals providing them care. Much of this customization is especially attractive to non-binary (neither strictly male nor female) individuals.

From simply unbundling things that have historically been considered package deals to experimental surgeries and outright biohacking... come learn about the gender transition "secret menu", compared and contrasted with the traditional options.

This talk will cover the following topics:

Social transition (briefly), including presentation, pronouns and name changes.

Medical transition, including hormone replacement therapy, surgeries and specialized drug regimens.

about this event: https://c3voc.de

Should we really be trying to make our tech indistinguishable from magic? Is there dark magic in tech? And what does that have to do with a teleporting duck in a classroom?!

We often hold creating 'a magical experience' as a key goal for design - it's fun, engaging, sometimes even playful, and it makes complex things look simple. But technological magic has a dark side too, especially when trying to help people learn and feel confident about technology.

By its nature, magic you experience is not under your control: it's a trick, and you're not supposed to be able to understand it; magic is inscrutable, and for many, that's disempowering.

In designing the BBC micro:bit and surrounding tools, we've thought a lot about the balance between the positive and the negative sides of creating of a magical experience.

This talk will reflect on our struggle to balance technical authenticity and honesty with the need to provide a high quality experience that excites and inspires students.

It will explain how we attempt to present simple, understandable analogs of more complicated, magical technology in order to help students gain a sense confidence with the tech around them. However, it will also look at how we've resorted to using our own bits of (nearly) invisible magic to make this all work nicely in a classroom.

Through this discussion we'll look in detail at the presentation of the micro:bit's IO, the way the micro:bit's USB interface works, the microphone privacy LED, the web-based compiler and the simple radio communication.

Finally, I will look beyond micro:bit at how using this concept of balancing transparency and magic can help us build better, more trustworthy tech.

about this event: https://c3voc.de

In 1939 World War 2 started and the British Council—Britain's shiny new organisation for overseas cultural relations and propaganda—inherited the suddenly-closed tourist board's film-making department. Tourism films are no use in a war, so the Council turned their topics towards more cultural content as a softer kind of propaganda. Thus began a decade of film production that would have phenomenal overseas impact but be almost totally forgotten in Britain.

Between 1940–1950, the British Council produced over 120 short documentary-style films about life in Britain covering sports, manufacturing, landscapes, art, architecture, public healthcare, the justice system, democratic process, public institutions like the National Trust and the BBC, and more besides.

A far cry from the Ministry of Information's rigid style, this collection features some of the earliest works by winning cinematographers Geoffrey Unsworth (2001: A Space Odyssey, Cabaret, Superman), and Jack Cardiff (A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes).

Distributed to over 100 countries worldwide, the films are stunning, dated, funny, and bizarre by turn. They depict beautiful countrysides, optimistic cities, strong industry, forward-thinking social structures, and hardworking, happy people. They depict exactly the popular image of 1940s Britain that persists to this day...

That may not be a coincidence.

In this talk I'll cover the history and development of this film collection, how it was shaped, who saw the films, their staggering success, and their untold global legacy.

about this event: https://c3voc.de

Sound effects are often heard but not explored. In this talk I will explain what goes into the process of creating video game sound effects, the way they impact a scene and how the smallest changes can make a massive difference to video games.

Join me as I show you how I create sounds for video games, why sound matters and helps players immerse themselves into the game's story and world.

about this event: https://c3voc.de

Every year we collect more data than before, and the tools we use to manage that data are evolving to accommodate our changing needs - but it can be difficult to keep up with all the innovations! This session will give you a tour of what's happening in open source databases, from someone who lives the adventures of open source data in her day job. You will travel from the well-trodden paths of relational databases, through the leafy glades of time series, to the landmarks of search and document databases. This session is recommended for people with an interest in software who want to learn about the overall trends, license changes, rising stars, and which database technologies are here to stay.

about this event: https://c3voc.de

Stickers are an essential part of our culture, our values. Stickers are everywhere! But why?

This talk will provide serious, evidence-based insights into the newest developments of the evolving discipline „Sticker Research“, including an overview of the the most recent peer-reviewed publications, highlighting the most valuable facts and findings. (And some stickers, of course.)

==> Update 2022-06-04 ~12 am - temporary agenda

+ Terminology

+ History of sticker science

+ Where are we now? Current developments.

+ Panini-Psychology: only the next hype?

+ Stickers and Covid: Remote Sticker Operation Center (“RStOC”)

+ Take-aways (do not include physical stickers)

about this event: https://c3voc.de

I'm an artist creating interactive installations. The hardest part is devising open-ended interaction, spaces that invite people to reveal their authentic selves, and to connect with those around.

But trends in technology have gone in the opposite direction. Whether it's for usability, profit, safety, profit or 'sparking joy', or profit (it's usually profit), 'User Experience Design' was the flavour of the 2010s. Human-Computer Interaction has become a very planned affair. And the more planned it gets, the less room there is for the ambiguous messy bits that make us human.

Could it be another way? Presenting...

✯✯✯ Rewilding Human-Computer Interaction ✯✯✯

where, instead of designing micromanaged user experiences, we create open-ended spaces that embrace the unknown, the messy and the human. The ills of the online world are not problems inherent to its users but to systems that prevent those users from existing fully as humans. The solution is not more design, but more wildness.

Soapbox aside, I do have a speculative project to share on this front.

In a collaboration with artist/AI researcher Panagiotis Tigas, we've been training Variational Autoencoders on improvised dance, and from these devising personalised interfaces that respond to creative movement. The resulting system allows you to move through a 16-dimensional parameter space while following the intuitions of the body. As an entangled black box system, I can't explain how to use it, but it can be learnt by the body through exploration and play.

We have it here at EMF as in Latent Voyage, letting you navigate the hallucinatory latent space of an image generating AI.

about this event: https://c3voc.de