It’s not surprising – the Congressseuche was a kind of flu that was common during previous congresses, and while being out sick for a week was already not great, with Covid and the risk of long-term damage, the tradeoff has changed quite a bit. With vaccines, the morbidity risk of Covid is mostly solved and long-term damage has been reduced, but it’s still not entirely gone.
I guess the bigger issue is COVID is never going away, so the tradeoff at this point is do you want to do something now with reasonable precautions like wearing masks in crowded halls or just never ever do it in person again. The never do it in person option makes sense for lots of things. There are tons of conferences that could just be webinars. But if you think doing it in person is good, the risks from COVID are going to be more or less identical in 2023, 2024, etc. Like I hope they do come out with that vaccine that’s nasal and addresses all variants, but uh, even after that it’s not realistically going to get 100% uptake.
The main Congress event isn’t held in a wildly different space (big convention center), and while it does have fewer cramped, hot, and sweaty hotel room parties than DC (I’m pretty sure I got COVID at one this year), instead it has more mixing of attendees with the general public in public transport.
By contrast, Camp is entirely outdoors (to the point that during a thunderstorm there’s nowhere really safe to go), with lots of fresh air and space for everyone.
Yeah, after Oktoberfest in Munich the numbers were spiking. Hospitals are full and they assume it will only be worse later this year. I think it is the right move, but still I am infinitely sad about it being cancelled
If any of y’all wanna come to iceland then I don’t mind organizing one of these decentralized alternatives.
Everything is political right about now so it’s just a question where you stand. The FOSS world is unique because we are the cyberspace equivalent of “the commons” and the painfully obvious problem is that people do not get rewarded for contributing to the commons. Therefore climate change. Therefore politics.
I want to politely disagree. I mean, yes the CCC is a political organization. (I’d even go so far and argue that every organization which declares itself apolitical is in favor of the status quo and thus, politically speaking conservative. But let’s not get into that here. Let’s talk about which kinds of politics belong here or have belonged here.)
In short, the CCC in Germany is somewhat comparable to the EFF in the USA and I’ve seen a significant variety of EFF blog posts on lobste.rs. This search here https://lobste.rs/domains/eff.org is totally including political stuff about governmental control of end-to-end encryption, privacy laws, consumer rights and most of that stuff was upvoted to more than 2 digits.
Maybe someone will search through the moderation log and find more removed submissions than those I find as not-removed, but I’d be surprised..
There’s no apolitical way to judge the politicalness of a lobsters submission. Every possible submission is hateful to some ideology, the only important question is whether that ideology is one that the lobsters moderators care about (either positively or negatively).
While I see where you are coming from calling them political, I think it can be odd to enforce it in a sane way. They have their ethical guides, which are very vague along the lines of “make use and share information, without borders” and “computers can be used for good”. Meanwhile the Go website featured a BLM banner on every page, and every other open source project mentions the war in Ukraine. Also Codes of Conduct tend to be political in nature and pretty much every discussion is too. You can go further with censorship resistance, discussing Amazon, Google, etc. On top of that the majority of discussions on AI and automation are political. Moreover the tags practices and philosophy, culture, person, practices and especially law have a huge likelihood of being political in one way or another. The same is true for many open source project including everything GNU related, OpenBSD, etc. have a political part to them.
I think when people talk about politics they mostly mean party/partisan politics and I think that’s not what the CCC is. They neither tell you how to vote nor are they very much tied do certain parties, especially given that on more political talks they already had a big spectrum even on talkers and it always has also been criticized by members of the CCC. And then the Club is not the Congress.
Given that they are often enough invited by politicians of all parties to give their expert opinions on topics and at least some see themselves more as a service and putting their political opinion aside in such situations, I think that if you remove CCC related news for this reason you really also have to remove any Go project links for their BLM banners, etc. But I am happy to not draw the lines there. I just hope they make sense. Usually in communities that “ban” political topics it’s more on topics that are pretty much set up to cause political discussions which a new on a famous event in computer science circles not happening isn’t.
I’m somewhat unhappy that there is a policy of banning everything from certain sources, disregarding the actual content, while I also understand it cause it’s work and effort, time which might be better spent in another way.
As soon as you talk about either individuals, groups of people or organizations and how they work or how their rules are ore are decided there’s politics involved. Like I said, many tags would have to be removed, for politics to be gone. And even then, it will creep in one way or another.
What are the ethical principles of hacking - motivation and limits
Access to computers - and anything which might teach you something about the way the world really works - should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!
All information should be free.
Mistrust authority - promote decentralization.
Hackers should be judged by their acting, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.
You can create art and beauty on a computer.
Computers can change your life for the better.
Don’t litter other people’s data.
Make public data available, protect private data.
The hacker ethics were first written down by Steven Levy in his book “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (ISBN 0-440-13405-6, 1984). He mentions the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT, their members constructed a supersystem of relays and switches - some of them became core members the ai lab. They used the term “hack” for an “elaborate … prank” with “serious respect implied”. The hacker ethics evolved in a time when computers were scarce; and the people sharing a machine had to think about rules of cooperation.
The last two point are additions by the CCC from the 80s. After some more or less crazy individuals from the hacker scene had the idea of offering their “hacker know-how” to the KGB there were intense discussions, three letter agencies have a somewhat different opinion about freedom of information. As well were intrusions into outside systems considered more and more counter productive.
To protect the privacy of the individual and to strengthen the freedom of the information which concern the public the yet last point was added.
Hacker ethics are —like the rest of the world— as such in constant discussion and development. The above rules should be considered as guidelines and basis for discussion.
Sounds like it’s because of COVID-19 infection risk for attendees though they don’t say it explicitly.
It’s fascinating that this is still such a concern after everyone who wanted (and even more) got their shots.
It’s not surprising – the Congressseuche was a kind of flu that was common during previous congresses, and while being out sick for a week was already not great, with Covid and the risk of long-term damage, the tradeoff has changed quite a bit. With vaccines, the morbidity risk of Covid is mostly solved and long-term damage has been reduced, but it’s still not entirely gone.
I guess the bigger issue is COVID is never going away, so the tradeoff at this point is do you want to do something now with reasonable precautions like wearing masks in crowded halls or just never ever do it in person again. The never do it in person option makes sense for lots of things. There are tons of conferences that could just be webinars. But if you think doing it in person is good, the risks from COVID are going to be more or less identical in 2023, 2024, etc. Like I hope they do come out with that vaccine that’s nasal and addresses all variants, but uh, even after that it’s not realistically going to get 100% uptake.
DEF CON (similar size) in August had close to 700 of 25,000 people report positive cases, but within that group over 12% of volunteer “goons” that had a better reporting rate.
The main Congress event isn’t held in a wildly different space (big convention center), and while it does have fewer cramped, hot, and sweaty hotel room parties than DC (I’m pretty sure I got COVID at one this year), instead it has more mixing of attendees with the general public in public transport.
By contrast, Camp is entirely outdoors (to the point that during a thunderstorm there’s nowhere really safe to go), with lots of fresh air and space for everyone.
Yeah, after Oktoberfest in Munich the numbers were spiking. Hospitals are full and they assume it will only be worse later this year. I think it is the right move, but still I am infinitely sad about it being cancelled
If any of y’all wanna come to iceland then I don’t mind organizing one of these decentralized alternatives.
Everything is political right about now so it’s just a question where you stand. The FOSS world is unique because we are the cyberspace equivalent of “the commons” and the painfully obvious problem is that people do not get rewarded for contributing to the commons. Therefore climate change. Therefore politics.
The CCC is political and should not be discussed here.
I want to politely disagree. I mean, yes the CCC is a political organization. (I’d even go so far and argue that every organization which declares itself apolitical is in favor of the status quo and thus, politically speaking conservative. But let’s not get into that here. Let’s talk about which kinds of politics belong here or have belonged here.)
In short, the CCC in Germany is somewhat comparable to the EFF in the USA and I’ve seen a significant variety of EFF blog posts on lobste.rs. This search here https://lobste.rs/domains/eff.org is totally including political stuff about governmental control of end-to-end encryption, privacy laws, consumer rights and most of that stuff was upvoted to more than 2 digits.
Maybe someone will search through the moderation log and find more removed submissions than those I find as not-removed, but I’d be surprised..
Well then if EFF posts have snuck in the moderations have some double standards.
Uhhh that would be your double standard then. I highly doubt that people here would be in favour of moderating posts about the CCC away. I hope?
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Sarcasm isn't going to improve this meta thread.]
There’s no apolitical way to judge the politicalness of a lobsters submission. Every possible submission is hateful to some ideology, the only important question is whether that ideology is one that the lobsters moderators care about (either positively or negatively).
While I see where you are coming from calling them political, I think it can be odd to enforce it in a sane way. They have their ethical guides, which are very vague along the lines of “make use and share information, without borders” and “computers can be used for good”. Meanwhile the Go website featured a BLM banner on every page, and every other open source project mentions the war in Ukraine. Also Codes of Conduct tend to be political in nature and pretty much every discussion is too. You can go further with censorship resistance, discussing Amazon, Google, etc. On top of that the majority of discussions on AI and automation are political. Moreover the tags practices and philosophy, culture, person, practices and especially law have a huge likelihood of being political in one way or another. The same is true for many open source project including everything GNU related, OpenBSD, etc. have a political part to them.
I think when people talk about politics they mostly mean party/partisan politics and I think that’s not what the CCC is. They neither tell you how to vote nor are they very much tied do certain parties, especially given that on more political talks they already had a big spectrum even on talkers and it always has also been criticized by members of the CCC. And then the Club is not the Congress.
Given that they are often enough invited by politicians of all parties to give their expert opinions on topics and at least some see themselves more as a service and putting their political opinion aside in such situations, I think that if you remove CCC related news for this reason you really also have to remove any Go project links for their BLM banners, etc. But I am happy to not draw the lines there. I just hope they make sense. Usually in communities that “ban” political topics it’s more on topics that are pretty much set up to cause political discussions which a new on a famous event in computer science circles not happening isn’t.
I’m somewhat unhappy that there is a policy of banning everything from certain sources, disregarding the actual content, while I also understand it cause it’s work and effort, time which might be better spent in another way.
As soon as you talk about either individuals, groups of people or organizations and how they work or how their rules are ore are decided there’s politics involved. Like I said, many tags would have to be removed, for politics to be gone. And even then, it will creep in one way or another.
It’s fine, and many of its talks have appeared here before.
How is it political?
(Genuinely, I’m not too familiar with the CCC as an organization, though I’ve enjoyed watching their technical talks over the years.)
Source: https://www.ccc.de/en/hackerethics