And those who don’t almost always only set a minimum price, so you can still pay more if you want. And if you buy on BC Friday [0] (next is February 6th), Bandcamp doesn’t even take a cut of the revenue.
> And if you buy on BC Friday [0] (next is February 6th), Bandcamp doesn’t even take a cut of the revenue.
Bandcamp Friday is such a fun day, I always have +5 purchases lined up from the previous month, and usually keep track of the social media of the artists I buy from that day, and many of them post something really wholesome about how much they made on that day :) Such a fun time all around.
I’ve wanted something like this ever since the early Napster days. Patreon is the closest thing but that puts an onus on the artists to produce content all of the time. If some of my favorite less popular artists had their Venmo in their Instagram profile I would probably use that.
I bought the vinyl release which also came with the digital download of an album last year. When the vinyl arrived, there was a handwritten personalized thank you note from the artist. Best of all worlds
this wasn't the point ... the point is that the whole thing is getting more and more political and less technical and fun.
I was at the camp and some congresses in the past and they where always fun but nowadays it seems like it's like a political movement event for certain strands and ideologies and way less fun and interesting things (thou there are gems) and it seems that you have to think a certain way or at least accept certain positions even if it's not your position because otherwise you are silly or something else.
IMHO, CCC is completely defanged as a political institution. They went along with contact tracing because the local app was open source and somewhat secure and many of the regulars in local spaces people will cause lots of drama if you don't wear a mask in 2025.
Most local hackerspaces I visited are basically green and leftist queer safe spaces where adults run around with stuffed animals. If that's what you're looking for, great, I'm not judging, it just doesn't click with me. I used to visit hackerpaces during my travels but regardless of how open and kind I approach a new place, once they ask me to mask up or inquire for my pronouns things just don't end well, even if I'm really polite in explaining my position. That's not the tolerance and open mindedness I encountered around 2009 during my first C3.
Still, I wish everyone attending the best of times. There's so many people there that I imagine you'll be able to find the right folks if you're there and look around.
Not looking for a debate or inciting hate towards anyone here.
Culture changes. Hacker culture in Europe changed too, young people are moving up and taking positions in local organizations. You didn't change with it, and you're not open to accepting that change, so you are feeling out of place - that's simply how this works.
A lot of those people will feel welcomed and will be treated with respect that they don't usually get everywhere else. They decided to embrace that, it comes at a cost - like you feeling weirded out and not showing up - but they're probably fine with that being your problem to figure out.
I've moved on, all good, change is perfectly fine. I just think they lost something that made CCC special. Got my own decentralized trusted circles now. I think I made it quite clear that I wish anyone still attending these events and spaces all the best regardless.
CCC always has been explicit far left/green, looking at its history, as other people in here have mentioned.
I think it would be fair to say that the club as a whole has become more open about that, I think that's more owed to a lot of folks driving initiatives feeling like the walls are closing in on them though and I can't exactly fault them for that :)
I can fully relate ... back in the days there wasn't much (at least I don't remember) of "this kind" of ppl and everything was just hacking. However I can imagine what you mean.
At the end this growing craziness does not change any time soon so you are right ... "finding the folks that fit you" is maybe the best advice (and this hasn't to be the CCC).
Fortunately the interesting talks are often recorded so nobody has to attend who don't want in order to get the interesting stuff.
I really do appreciate your willingness to live and let live. Too many people from all perspectives are missing that ability when it comes to non-critical things, and forget that they can just… not hang out with the people they disagree with.
The other comments below you seem to be willingly ignoring that you did the mature/kind thing and just wished them well and moved on, whereas a less mature person would have caused a ruckus.
No problem. And FWIW, I’m what I’d consider a highly left-wing person. I only say that to give a sample that not all of us are like that. But I recognize that the loud ones get the attention.
I draw the line on live-and-let live only when the other person’s ideology poses a physical threat to me or my liberties, or those of other folks. But what you describe is how things ought to be - if you don’t feel like hanging around leftists, who the hell cares? I probably wouldn’t want to hang out in a highly conservative space, but I also don’t care if they hang out without me.
Yeah, it's really not wierd that people thinking that using secure technologies, firewalls and privacy to defend against infections on their electronics would also strongly support using a firewall to defend themselves from disease in the physical space.
The fact that your opinion usually comes together with other incompatible political opinions of folks that's been running those spaces for decades doesn't help either.
They didn't change. You however became something they always despised.
>it's really not wierd that people thinking that using secure technologies, firewalls and privacy to defend against infections on their electronics would also strongly support using a firewall to defend themselves from disease in the physical space
On the other hand, there is a discongruency when people who are against control and surveillance start implementing control and surveillance because the particular purpose sanctified the means. Something that previously seemed non-negotiable, culturally fundamental even, was toppled.
> using secure technologies, firewalls and privacy to defend against infections on their electronics
Why not use secure technologies, firewalls and privacy to defend against infections in general?
Isn't it also clear who benefits from this decreased trust in politics, or the apathy in politics? It is always the same group: the far right authoritarians.
You just gave the best example of how these interactions usually play out. You know basically nothing about me and yet you assume to know exactly "what I've become" and that I deserve to be "despised" based on 2 statements that don't tell you anything about me because I never explained my positions in depth.
I spent more than a decade in and around 2-3 local hackerspaces and some of the best practices and infrastructure I introduced/built are still in place. You really know nothing about me to arrive at this conclusion, thereby proving my point that the culture has shifted - not me.
> Most local hackerspaces I visited are basically green and leftist queer safe spaces where adults run around with stuffed animals.
So what? You’re not being asked or expected to feel empathy - just show tolerance. Which is the easiest virtue to develop - just ignore behavior which doesn’t threaten you.
If someone is doing their own thing - wearing a MAGA hat, a rainbow t-shirt or carrying a fluffy toy - it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. Why does it bother you unless they’re getting in your face?
What is "so what" supposed to mean that isn't covered already by the exact sentence afterwards? Why even come at me with "tolerance" when that's exactly what I haven't been receiving, as I laid out in the paragraph you selectivity quoted. What's your point exactly?
> Synonyms of bigot
> a narrow-minded person who obstinately adheres to their own opinions and prejudices
especially : one who strongly and unfairly dislikes or feels hatred toward others based on their group membership
I merely shared a behaviorial observation of something I find odd. At no time did I react with prejudice or hate towards any particular group.
We might be the same age; I remember that defacing conservative websites was already a C3 thing about 20 years ago. Back then, it felt good to punch up against authoritarianism. Hackers hated Bush and his Patriot Act just as much as many hate Trump now. In Germany, the CDU is of course the perennial enemy.
But what happens when authoritarianism does not come from the right, but from the left or center? (Not a contradiction: East Germany was an "anti-fascist" totalitarian state as recently as 40 years ago.) Sadly, I think we have been slowly moving in this direction since Covid, where I was genuinely shocked that many of my "leftie" friends had turned into government drones (from my perspective), while they were deeply disappointed that I was now a "right-winger" (from their perspective).
The more aware they become of how unpopular some of their politics are, the less they believe in democracy as a concept, while I'm still jealous of countries that have proper referendums and freedom of speech. Hate Speech laws are accelerating this divide.
Anyway, I think that these are the dynamics that are driving many people apart who all simultaneously claim to not have changed in decades. The CCC is still doing a lot of great work, but I do feel it drifting away from me because it is not so much about punching up than about punching right.
The authoritarianism quick clearly and explicitly comes from the far right, Putin and Trump. Claiming anything else is ridiclous, its not even hidden anymore. Its a clear outright endorsment.
Back in the Bush days it was about defending freedom but being to invasive about doing it. Nobody was talking about Bush they do about Trump. And the CDU of old is certaintly not the modern AfD.
Claiming the lefts action in covid even approches the lines of thought out of Trump, AfD or Putin isnt a serious argument.
That is not what I said at all. My claim is that, regardless of what the authoritarian right is doing, the left has become more tolerant of authoritarianism itself, especially to 'save democracy' (which is again reminescent of the GDR, starting from its very name).
As to why this split is happening, I'd argue it was easier to be anti-authoritarian when we were in the opposition, just as today's AfD reliably votes against Chat Control or other power grabs because it makes them look good at no cost. But the left has become a dominant force due to its long march through the institutions, and some want to use this power to crush the enemy (debanking, police raids for milquetoast internet comments). Others look at the internet compass from your sibling post and decide they'd rather hang out with people in the libertarian right than with _any_ kind of authoritarian.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying the CCC is an authoritarian organization. But I doubt they'll ever be too critical of our intransparent "Trusted Flagger" system, for example, because they know it would anger many in their crowd. 20 years ago we'd have agreed that this kind of crap only happens in China.
Hacking and politics was always deeply intertwined in Germany/Europe. Especially the CCC has always been at least as much a political organization as it is a hacker community.
Hey, at least you can reasonably argue that the political content has been headed downhill since the more aggressive days of the past. Do we see wikileaks or the likes anymore? Not really.
Without direct action it's just nerds reading out their blog posts about politics, which couldn't be less interesting.
There has been plenty of direct action in recent years, but I can't really think of any on a global scale. Lots of smaller things on a German level, like journalists reporting about infiltrating a Great Replacement conference hosted by the second biggest political party here.
Sure, but it is unarguably much more boring stuff than it was years ago. I attend almost every Congress with a variety of groups, and there's certainly been a culture shift over the years from lots of anarchists who had no qualms with breaking the law to much more corporate scaredy-cats.
Congress seems to keep growing so perhaps this is just serving a broader audience. But knowing a lot of long-time attendees, I'm certainly not alone in thinking Congress is starting to be less interesting than it used to be. I'm certainly not trying to say the event sucks though, there's still a plenty of interesting stuff happening.
Back in the old days, you could sit down at a table in the hackcenter and do stuff that was more of the exploratory pentesting kind. Because everyone around you understood. Because there were strict "no-photos" policies in place. Because all people were technical and in it primarily for the technical challenge.
Nowadays you cannot do that anymore, because most visitors are non-technical. Nobody respects the photo policy. Everyone judges your actions through their political lens. Instead all the "action" happens elsewhere and CCC became much more about social stuff, talking and politics. And of course about policing and judging other peoples' politics.
I'm not just referring to the talks, but the whole event. But we used to have groups like wikileaks heavily featured, they certainly weren't worried about too many eyeballs.
>like journalists reporting about infiltrating a Great Replacement conference hosted by the second biggest political party here.
And making stuff up that was never talked about there to start a political movement to get that party banned? Yeah nice democracy and journalism there.
Actually I can't ask a court whether you were at that conference without knowing your legal identity - care to share? And why should I expect the court to have a complete list of who was there, and to answer questions about that list? Seems much easier to ask you, and it's strange you don't want to answer.
What are you talking about? Pure nonsense. Discussions about "great replacement" never happened, that's an undeniable fact proven by court records and news media are not allowed to repeat these claims (324 O 439/24, 324 O 524/24, 7 W 78/24).
You might want to check your own source there. Seems to be the opposite of what you claim. The complaints were dismissed and the media is allowed to report.
You might want to read the post again, the court claimed it not as a journalistic news article but as an opinion piece. And it's not the final verdict.
The user had more arguments than just "it's all politics". What level of scrutiny does his statement have to hold up to? Because as far as I am concerned this is not here to find scientific truths.
I don't know man. It's always the same debate: It's either "too much politics" or
"no change at all" whenever this issue comes up and the "nothing changed" crowd keeps on reminding everyone that C3 "was always like that". I'm not requesting a scientific study but if you're this convinced that nothing changed despite may old school attendees chiming in to confirm the opposite, perhaps it would be helpful to compare old and new schedules.
I find it strange you didn't latch on to the original comment, which has the exact same problem you complained about, but reacted to the response. The best action is to ignore threads and sub-threads you don't care about and leave others who do to their fun.
well, it has a lot to do with people growing up during cold war and german reunification.
There were many stories where people lost faith in politics (e.g. after Chernobyl), so people gathered together to do stuff on their own. I think being "social" (to all people), decentralized and mistrusting authorities is just a left thing. so that's just a natural thing imho
That chernobyl and western politics is in any way connected is due to decades unscientific fearmongering. And Berlin has always been a hotbed for that.
and the problem is that if you apply for a job in this area you have to know them all +10 years experience with all the frameworks and backend stuff, sql, docker
More money. More power. Greed. Don't ever underestimate human greed. It doesn't matter what people have or where they are, they will always want more. We only have what we have now because of a few very peculiar people like Richard Stallman, but now it's just a bunch of normies in control.
I'm guessing immortality I'm not joking. We may be the generation that has the right escape velocity to escape death. Vladimir putin mentioned it in his recent china summit
I think it's an unintended effect of Europe regulations. Google saw Apple exploring what's the bare minimum to comply with EU regulations regarding openness. And Google is setting their bar there.
Because Apple didn't want to open their ecosystem, they invested a bunch of money (and time) into "exploring what's the bare minimum required to comply with EU regulations". Now Google is locking their ecosystem down the same way because they know they are legally allowed to do so.
This is why it's an "unintended side effect" of EU regulations, as the regulations prompted Apple to find out how much user hostile behaviour they can get away with.
It's not sudden, and it's about control. You probably don't remember a time when you could switch/remove batteries from your phone. All manufacturers removed this ability.
That was one very good reason for me to choose a FairPhone. (Almost?) everything is user replaceable. It has been in my pocket for a could of years and I have not needed to replace anything yet. But I do like having the option.
Samsungs Galaxy S21 is also really simple to fix stuff. The back is made of relatively flexible plastic connected via glue, which you can easily get under by blowing into the charging/speaker port. Once your inside its all just a lot of screws.
Had to reattach the battery ribbon cable after my phone fell one too many times (I could have also just fixed it by pressing on the back in the right place, but I only really figured that out after I disassembled the phone).
I have a Volla Phone running Ubuntu Touch. In order to insert my SIM and SD cards I had to take off the back cover (which is intended and I just had to pull on a small gap in a corner of the device) which also made it very obvious that it's easy to take out the battery should I have the need to swap it out.
It's actually not happening all of a sudden. The dam-breaking moment is more that Samsung, the number #1 Android vendor, decided to stop supporting it.
The vendors stop maintaining bootloader-unlocking methods because the cost/benefit profile to develop/maintain/support that feature and its consequences is simply not sufficient, all while several of the biggest customers explicitly require unlock to NOT be supported.
Supporting this is not just about the unlock itself, it's about allowing this unlock (required as some carriers explicitly forbid this, so a unlock needs to be requested), then performing the procedure (using a shared secret between the device and the vendor) and then the OS continuing to boot in this untrusted state with all components gracefully handling this broken trust-chain.
The commercial incentive for this feature isn't there for a device-vendor, it actually never was. It was built, defended and fought for by passionate people (mostly within the R&D) of those companies. Companies which managed to implement it early (in times of higher product margins) were able to keep it longer, others simply couldn't get the budget to implement bootloader-unlock in the first place. Today, devices are shipped with commitments of several years of upgrades, without the vendor actually knowing yet how the OS-upgrade in 2 years will look like. Keeping his custom security-implementation is a risk-factor here
The 3rd party OS developer community was always small, and became even smaller in the past years. The footprint of alternative OS users was shrinking since Cyanogen (the leading "universal kernel" developers for Android and predecessor of LineageOS) dissolved (or tried to become a for-profit).
However, the events around Cyanogen were more of a public symptom, The main driver for people to stop using 3rd party OS's was:
1.) The increasing fragmentation of devices in the market: When the community started, the majority of the market was Samsung, Motorola, LG, Sony. Samsung was leading, but each of them had quite healthy parts of the Android market, competing with each other in an "almost-stalemate" situation. Today Samsung is leading with a huge margin, all others are basically fighting for scraps. So naturally, most of them try to go for the lowest common denominator and find a distribution channel.
2.) Android itself became more competitive: At the height of the OS community, people switched to alternative OS's to get a newer OS, new customization options and convenience features. Today, vanilla Android checks most of the convenience options already, sufficiently that most people don't want to bother researching alternative options, maintaining them, etc.
Devices of major vendors are receiving upgrades for several years (back then it was ONE major-OS Upgrade, a YEAR after Google's release, if at all)
3.) Device-integrity became more important: At the height of the OS-community, there was no Device Integrity check by Google to give a flag on whether the device can be trusted or not, so all apps kept working (with minor exception of some streaming services restricting their service/resolution, as the DRM keystore became unavailable on unlock). Today, most banking and entertainment apps rely on those Google integrity checks to decide whether they should even start. This introduced another reason for users to consider their actual need for an alternative OS.
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How to change that: If it's not possible to create a commercial incentive for the vendors, a regulatory incentive could be an option.
It's crazy to think how much computing power is just added to a drawer or landfill every day, just because there is no reason for the vendor to allow you to repurpose it.
I think this could be a path, to legally require device-vendors to provide a common SW-layer with respective documentation to utilize features of underlying hardware (optional without the shipped OS on top, disconnecting the device from the shipped ecosystem).
This would prevent e-waste and put this old hardware to better use. A community OS could then be built on top of this common SW-layer and be maintained for a wider range of devices.
I would e.g. LOVE a "Browser on everything" OS which just provides a Browser OS for outdated hardware, but the only way this could work on scale would be if the device-vendor would be mandated to provide and document the lower layer...
Someone would have to make the economic case for such a regulation as well, i.e. demonstrate the benefit for society if that is in place. The chances for this are razor-thin, especially in today's public/political climate.
Yeah well, not in the way it progressed after the carriers started to take control over it (I was actively involved in a Firefox device-project back then).
What I sketched out here with a "Browser on everything" OS would be a concept for a aftermarket OS, where the device-vendor is not required to have his OS support the unlocked HW (because he can't be forced to do that), but he will have to provide components and documentation up to a certain layer to make use of the hardware. This could then be the layer for a generic "Browser on everything" OS to work on.
Very much thanks for this text. This makes much sense.
I don't think regulation would help ... only ppl who show their raised middle finger to this vendors.
I mean this scenario is the scenario ppl thought of when TPM came up ... a fcking closed up device and you are in the hands of the vendors.
People showing their middle finger won't be enough, because the vendors are torn between two groups of interests here:
1. Building a HW/SW product which works within controlled boundaries to provide warranty, support, repairs, future maintenance, Google-compliance, regulatory compliance,...
2. A subset of Customers wanting the HW to be separable from the SW, for product to be open in a way that they can use it differently than intended (potentially creating "Group#3", a HW/SW product with a different SW).
To create a product for Group#2, alot of the aspects of Group#1 still apply, but in a more-complicated, more-expensive manner. If there is a viable business-case for Group#2, it will be a separate more-expensive product with lower volume.
But in reality, the only way a vendor could meaningfully resolve the needs of Group#2 is if ALL his devices support this feature (including customers who don't want a unlockable "open" device now), allowing everyone to become member of Group#2 without having to buy a new separate product.
For this, the economic incentive doesn't exist.
Explicit example: The Fairphone is a great device, but it will never sell more volume than a Samsung Flagship, because it's a device satisfying the conscious needs of a niche of customers, without the chance of reaching comparable volume to compete in all other areas.
That's why the only chance I see is to create a regulatory incentive by making the requirements of Group#2 a part of Group#1, to have the "unconscious needs" of the majority also satisfied.
Because only THEN the mainstream-customer can be converted to *users* of this potential "Group#3" product, and market-forces have a chance to flow freely again, if you see what I mean...
The government is also keen to have these devices controlled more tightly. Now with the help of the big companies so much data is on the device and in the cloud about you that policy enforcement, tax evasion or anything else that the people in the government deemed crucial for them is much more easily done.
Check how China controls the Uyghurs phones and will they be happy to have "unlocked bootloaders".
It's not profitable for the companies to lose total control of "your" device you "bough", nor for software developers who sell you the software to have "ReVanced" versions of their apps. Just a small minority of people who understand what is freedom and ownership are aware of the dangers of this.
Basically, not enough people care to have this as a priority and make it an election issue. And sadly we're walking into more and more control, ads, and enshitification. :(
> The government is also keen to have these devices controlled more tightly.
Not to oppose what you wrote, but let me try to give you a different view on the same picture to support a different conclusion:
In the eye of most governments these devices play such a minor role that they practically don't even exist.
What governments see is messaging services, finance services, digital marketplaces, and so on. It was and is their job to do that. They used to regulate telecom providers, financial institutions, marketplaces in the past, and they are now catching up realizing that the carrier is no longer the messaging provider, banks are not in control of all finance flows, marketplaces exist beyond the classical physical markets, etc.
If you look at detailed regulation and laws, Governments still have little interest in the explicit devices, they still look at those new variants of classical services and try to adapt to them.
But what the PROVIDERS of those services do, is creating pressure on the devices to help them reach lowest-effort compliance for their SERVICE-requirements (--> "let's make the end-user device bulletproof trusted, so we can offload our responsibilities to his device").
This is in most cases why the devices evolve the way they do. Because they are a merge of product and services (often from the same vendor), and the product is evolving to satisfy the needs for those services.
That's why fighting for "ownership of your device" is mostly futile, because the assumed opponent in this fight doesn't even feel addressed.
You need to bring the fight to their topics, to the topics relevant for governments:
On how a citizen ID should be verified, how financial services should be realized, how a competitive market should be ensured also on digital markets, etc.
Less conspiratorial answer (better late than never):
Google services, integrity hardening:
From outside it might be difficult to understand the distinction, but Google is acting here as the owner and maintainer of a services ecosystem, which is the entire Google service-package provided to end-users. For them, Android is provided as a foundation for that package, and they increasingly experience difficulty to contain issues within that ecosystem and prevent them from spreading (piracy, malware, hacking,...).
The logical way out for them to contain those issues is to ensure that members of this ecosystem (=Devices with Google Services, Developers) are vetted more strongly.
Now Android has a history to be an open ecosystem, which allowed it to grow to the size it has now. But similar to the bootloader-unlock situation of device-vendors, the economic incentive of an "open ecosystem" keeps shrinking in comparison to the risks and issues it's causing Google in governing their services-ecosystem.
They obviously decided now that the price they have to pay for that "open ecosystem" (less control over the services ecosystem) is not justified anymore.
Now they have little room to move. In order to preserve that "open ecosystem", they would have to provide the user an option to disable Google Services entirely. But Google services are such a integral part of the OS-experience already that it which would turn the device almost into a completely separate product, different from the product the vendor initially built and the consumer initially purchased.
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I don't expect this to be properly resolved for the sake of "pleasing the community". Products and Services are already so tightly combined in the Smartphone-space that it's hard for most to even understand what it is the user actually purchased when he bought the device.
Now Google the service provider starts to change the users' device in order to maintain his services, and there is no up-to-date definition to what degree they are actually allowed to do this.
How to change that: The underlying customer-protection framework is missing. A solution would be a general legally binding definition of what functions a customer owns if (and when) a device is stripped of any services on top.
If my car loses functions once it loses connection to the manufacturer, this bare set should be communicated as the purchased value ("in exchange for your money"), separately from any on-top ("in exchange for your data") business-model.
In theory this could create competition on the actual purchased value again, instead of continuing to offload the value from the device to some service provided by the vendor/service-provider...
But that's such a complex topic, the implications should be studied much deeper. Also, I don't expect political bodies to fully understand it for years to come, leave alone create a proper case to get the required voting and decision...
> Google is acting here as the owner and maintainer of a services ecosystem...
> they increasingly experience difficulty to contain issues within that ecosystem and prevent them from spreading (piracy, malware, hacking,...)
I wonder if the smartphone app industry is big enough now that allowing just two corporates to govern them is no longer fair or democratic.
It has outgrown the "ecosystem" word a long time ago. It's a genuine industry now.
Apps are such a fundamental part of most people's lives now (whether they like it or not), and these two companies have a disproportionate amount of power over an entire industry.
This is more or less the journey the EU has started with the Digital Markets Act, but in a very agnostic way.
They identified that, among others, Apple and Google are operating a "Digital Market" of significant size within their ecosystem, where they invite others to participate and compete, and it's the role of a government to ensure fair conditions in the markets of its economy so forces can flow freely.
The way they defined that is very smart. They don't define what an "app" is or an ecosystem, they identify in a objective way that their operations constitute a market, and that they have to comply to certain rules in order to ensure fair competition.
I just hope that they can see this through and have those Digital Markets established as proper "markets" in the same sense as physical markets are, before some political "wind of change" is dissolving everything again.
Apple is very much counting on such a wind of change, by actively rallying its users against the EU...
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