31st Chaos Communication Congress

Just at the end of last year I went to the 31c3, the annual hacker's conference organised by the Chaos Computer Club. I've been following this event via the streams and by watching the recorded videos for many years. This time, however, I actually made my way to Hamburg. Even though I did not know many people there, it was a truly great experience, since the atmosphere is very open and welcoming.

At the first day I felt a little lost in the CCH building with its labyrinth of confusing escalators and staircases. Also I did not quite understand the character of the different areas in this gigantic hackspace. It might seem obvious, but if feels very different if one chats to someone about his crypto setup at one place called Noisy Square or if you get someone to explain to you how his new 3D printer works in the hardware hacking hall — just because of the surroundings.

Most of the four days I spent walking around, chatting to people about their projects and participating in a few workshops (Lockpicking, Keysigning Party, Cryptoparty). I also went to a few of the ongoing talks. From what I have seen so far (either in the audience or recorded) I can highly recommend the following:

You can either watch these talks online, or you can download these or likewise all other talks from this year's congress using a small Python script, which I wrote. For each talk it automatically downloads the recorded video, the abstract and all files which were attached in the Fahrplan. Essentially all you need is a plain text file which contains all four-digit talk-ids line by line. This file should then be passed to the script. For example to download all talks I mention above, you simply create a file 31c3talks.list with the ids

6258
6450
6121
6369
6251
6173
6602
6294
6574

and then you execute

down_frab_videos.py 31c3talks.list

Note, that the script requires the Python modules requests, beautifulsoup4 and some others (see the README.md). Feel free to download it from github.