This week I had time to follow the 26c3 remotley from home via video live streams. And this was a really great and inspirational experience to me. Here is what it looked like on my computer during the conference:

I had all three live streams from the different conference tracks on screen, so I was able to switch between the talks if one got boring to me. This is actually a great enhancement opposed to being present physically on a conference.

The good things about Hackers/Geeks/Nerds is, that they know how to actualy *make* a great event and even better they know how to setup first class video streaming of all conference sessions and talks. :-) I didn't seen such a perfect live streaming setup before for any conference. It was a pleasure to follow this streams in great quality without any tecnical problems. In the closing event they said, that they had up to 30.000 followers on the live streams during the event, what is very impressive and makes this conference really big. If such streaming gets standard, you can qualitatively follow a conference without actually beeing there physicaly!

A proof that they got really big now is, that they got it into the german main news show tagesthemen, and were referenced to as a "gathering of the computer science elite"! :-)

The first talk I saw on monday night from the stream dumps was a talk of two guys from the wikileaks project who gave an introdution to the project. And a great project called "offshore publication centre", which sould take place in Iceland. I think, this is a very good new thing to have actually. And it has the potential to really take an effect on how things will go in the future and on working out how things "really" went in the past. Also an conspiracy theorists heaven (or hell), one can say. ;-) And as they actually need some money to set up this datacentre in Iceland, I think that google would make shine a really good light on its own, if they would sponsor this datacentre to the internet and the world as a whole. 

An other talk in german was from the topic very interesting to me, because it addresses my very own field of interest "all things geospatial". :-) But to be honest, the talk was kind of lame...
Sadly the submitter (Mario Kluge) of the talk went ill, so a substitute (Martin Schaller) had to give the talk.
It was a talk about an actual implementation of a routing application, which also augments camera captured images from handheld devices (smartphones) with information according to the computed route. According to them the layer (german: Lage) sensor of todays smartphones like the iPhone are not precise enough to be really precise with the augmentations. In the Q&A's it turned out that the augmented reality "module" was "sponsored" by the University of Potsdam. I'm not sure what this means, as in which kind of "sponsored" - developed it for them or gave money to develop it by them self. But a working binary of navit including the augmented reality features should be available in January according to Martin Schaller.

You can access the video of this talk from here.

There was another talk by Christiane Ruetten, which was very intelligent and inspirational. She talked about the emergence of humans with technology. I may not able to fully reproduce her ideas in the moment, but She stated that some kinds of new "individuals" or "borgs" with a "special" kind of filter or intelligence are emerging from (social) networks within the internet. As I said very intelligent...

And there was one talk of a guy named Bicyclemark, which was so full of buzz that I nearly had to puke (sorry). Don't take me to serious here, maybe I just don't like this guy, but I'm not sure If he got that nearly nobody in the audience bought what he was selling... (Apple products by the way). It was just awkward. The rethorical tricks he was trying to use came so bad, that it was kind of offending and annoying to me. This talk was no good for Apple in this audience, because most people actually got what his talk was really all about: Apple advertisement. If you ever need some example or reference for a buzzword talking "not really doing what he talks about" guy, this guy is a good reference. ;-) Sad, because the content he was talking about would normaly interest me a lot... but not this way. :-/

You can access the video of this talk from here.

Another talk by Aaron Kaplan which was interesting to me because of the covered topic. It is a very intersting talk about technical and privacy issiues of location tracking for mobile devices using technologies like WLan triangulation and the maintained databases behind this technology. This is very valuable information for all who develop or use mobile location aware applications.

You can access the video of this talk from here.

A nice talk by Dan Kaminsky about internet security. I liked his talk even if he also was going a bit too much into the "buzzland" for my taste, but I guess in other mindsets this kind of talk giving is seen as a feature and not as a bug. ;-) Although he brought up some really intelligent stuff, like that passwords and certificates are somewhat a new kind of exchange medium or new "money". Got me a bit of thinking...

You can access the video of this talk from here.

This was a great finish of the year! I don't really know how to describe it (yet), but this event has a very nice enlightenend and inspiring compound of "geekism", "hackism", counter coulture elemnts and subversive spirit, to which I feel kind of attracted to. Thanks to the organizers and the great internet streaming of this event!

In the closing event they mentioned the SIGINT three day event in Cologne, which is my home town and where I live as of today :), between the 22. and 24. of may 2010. There is a very big chance, that I may participate in this event.