I don't have much time this year, but the two talks I intend to watch are Squeezing a key through a carry bit by Filippo Valsorda [1] and LatticeHacks by Tanja Lange, Nadia Heninger and djb[2].
EDIT: Just saw that there is a talk by Maxim Goryachy and Mark Ermolov: Inside Intel Management Engine [3], can't miss that one.
The gamification talk currently going on is painting a very effective picture of China basically taking the most evil position possible with technology.
There was a extra credit episode on that. Yes, that is purest evil. The sort that laughs alone, at night in front of a mirror, because even other evil shuns such company.
Does anyone know how you can actually attend? The talks look interesting and I'd like to look into going next year, but I spent a few minutes online and on their site, blog and wiki, and couldn't even find where the damn thing is, let alone a ticket website!
It's like they don't want people discovering it, I can't figure out why they don't have a more accessible marketing website.
CCC is so heavily oversubscribed that there is an insane race every year when tickets are released, usually involving downtime for the ticketing app. If finding the app itself already presents too much effort for you (hint: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=ccc%20tickets ), it's unlikely you'll succeed in acquiring a ticket.
Your best bet is to source one through some affiliated group, if you know of one, otherwise spend a few hours familiarizing yourself with the ticket app, and have at least 2 browsers with at least 10 tabs each open on the app ready for the second a release happens
I attended a few years ago (28C3). Had a great time and gave my first (unofficial) talk ever there. Found people to be supportive and chill; maybe it had to do with the fact that I was rather young at the time. I don't know.
That said, it is frustrating that they don't release the schedule weeks ahead. I was seriously thinking about attending but did not go through because conferences these days tend to have far less technical content than they used to.
When you're competing against bots (or people, not sure which) making a few hundred HTTP POSTs/sec, having a few extra horses in the race helps immensely, especially when >50% of those requests are going to fail anyway
As the demand for tickets is always very high, tickets were first distributed only to local groups, hackerspaces and people who helped out the last years with a viral system. You could only buy a ticket with a voucher, which then granted you another voucher to give to a friend. The presale for everyone was in October/November at some fixed times, but the tickets were sold out within minutes.
Usually you'll have to get a ticket a month in advance. I'm just speculating, but the conference already has a lot of attendees and maybe doesn't feel it gets better with more. And word of mouth seems to work pretty well..
Yeah, if they're already oversubscribed it makes sense that bringing more people in would have zero benefit for them (unless they wanted to raise the price). Thanks for the link!
The minimum ticket price is does not cover costs, but is available so everyone can come. Tickets are also sold at cost-covering level and on a donation basis.
Almost all work is done by the participants (I think toilet cleaners are paid, but that's it) and there is very little sponsoring, so it works out. Not sure what more money would help with.
It grew by word of mouth to, IIRC, 12.000 attendees last year; it outgrew several locations and is now at a size where it is actually hard to find a location that can house the event.
Maybe it is not "shitty marketing" but an attempt at crowd control ;)
Please use this instead of versions people are dumping on youtube and monetizing them and then the nicely cut versions not being found anymore because the algorithm thinks the official CCC version is a reupload.
How about making just a small tweak to the limited liability corporation legislation/rules? Currently the main purpose of a corporation is to maximize the (long term) shareholder value. What if the purpose was to maximize the long term goods sold, taxes paid or salaries paid instead? Note that you would still need to pay a decent return to shareholders in order to maximize these other things, just like currently you need (usually) to sell goods, pay a salary and pay your taxes to maximize the shareholder value.
(This may sound like a joke, but I am actually serious. Nobody has been able to justify so that I would have understood why it is the common stock holders whose value a corporation maximizes instead of other stakeholders. After all, the original reason limited liability was invented was to enable projects that bring good for the society, but are so damn risky that nobody is willing to take the full liability.)
Note that you would still need to pay a decent return to shareholders in order to maximize these other things, just like currently you need (usually) to sell goods, pay a salary and pay your taxes to maximize the shareholder value.
No, you would still need to grow to a large company with lots of revenue, but if the metric to optimize is salaries paid, then paying shareholders anything at all is in direct conflict with paying salaries to workers. The problem here is designing set of incentives that would encourage appropriate results, and the difficulty is that not all incentives work equally well, or even at all.
No, the difference is that you need to pay salaries in order for company to continue operating. If you don't, the employees will just quit.
On the other hand, there's absolutely no need to pay anything to shareholders for a company to operate, other than legal obligation. Shareholders going on strike makes absolutely no difference for the company.
No, you only pay the returns after you got funded. Except of contract enforcement in court, the investors have absolutely no way to force the company to pay up. That's what I meant by "legal obligations".
Of course, if you get yourself a reputation of not returning money to investors, you'll unlikely to get funded the next time, and if the investors have no way to force the company to pay dividends, they will fund few companies in the first place. The point is, maximizing salaries paid is a terrible metric, precisely because of bad incentives it creates.
> This applies only to companies that do not require capital to operate/grow.
But when they require capital to grow, you aren't returning the money to investors anyway -- what would be the point of that? The investors only expect the dividends once the capital needs of the company are satisfied, and once that happens, the company no longer needs the investors.
Not necessarily -- the board decides that. Shareholders don't have anything directly to say as to how exactly company is operated, and for good reason -- if they did, they could be held liable for the company actions.
Both are basically optimization processes that yield considerable risk and that are tricky to regulate, but in case of cooperations you still have the human element: vulnerability/fallibility, social reputation/integration, slowness/interpretability, empathy. The best policies to mitigating the respective risks probably are quite different.
My question is how can the "advice" in CCC and other open investigations into state of the tech world be distilled into actionable things for "normal" techies?
Everyone who is here is a "normal" techie. Sure, skill levels and focus areas vary but there's common shared interests.
Actionable things come out of the conference when someone who listens to a talk starts thinking and discussing and forming ideas for starting or contributing to a project. There's no formula to guarantee "success" for that.
EDIT: Just saw that there is a talk by Maxim Goryachy and Mark Ermolov: Inside Intel Management Engine [3], can't miss that one.
[1] https://events.ccc.de/congress/2017/Fahrplan/events/9021.htm...
[2] https://events.ccc.de/congress/2017/Fahrplan/events/9075.htm...
[3] https://events.ccc.de/congress/2017/Fahrplan/events/8762.htm...