Honestly I was impressed by the professionalism of the 30th Chaos Communication Congress. It changed a lot from the last time I visited ( 25c3), grew bigger without loosing its atmosphere. With the assemblies and workshops the event starts to get more and more interactive.
##Talk Recommendations##
I link to the youtube streams of the recordings yet you can get them also over at media.ccc.de
Due to recent events, there were a lot of Snowden/NSA themed talks. I skipped most of them (as some were just plain to catch attention, others were simply to depressing).
Seeing The Secret State: Six Landscapes is a must watch on the topic. I don’t want to spoil to much, just watch it.
Machines that make DIY is always fun. Although talking with Nadya Peek after the presentation, I think she could have given a better talk (the chat was more interesting).
How to Build a Mind Relatively high level talk about artificial intelligence and related topics, quite entertaining.
FPGA 101 Karsten Becker gives a good overview about why and when you want/don’t want to use FPGAs. I have not much experience, yet usually programming FPGAs sucked the few days I tried it. The toolchain he introduces sounds cool. As a friend of mine said the right level of nerdiness enough to be interesting and not too much to lose the audience.
SD-Card Exploits So SD-cards have micro processors and guess what you can program them yourself. Quite scary :)
##My Talk Feedback## I was a bit surprised how positive it was. As the talk is kind of scary. If you imagine we are really able to infer how much somebody understands about a material using eye gaze, who should be allowed to access this information? Is it alright, to trust Google, Apple, Samsung etc. with this type of information? It might no longer be “just” our personal communication that can be recorded and analyzed, but also our reading habits and comprehension level.
If you haven’t seen it yet, feel free to watch it. You can also give feedback on the talk if you want. Highly appreciated.