Funny to see a bunch of (quickly flagged) comments that show a clear misunderstanding of what the German hacker scene is and wants.
Besides not being a monolith and this being amenable to labeling as such, it's still in many parts different from many other hacker scenes.
The CCC has always had the ambition (and backing credentials/skills) to be a political movement as much as a technological one. In fact that's the origin story of the Congress; Wau Holland inviting others to "do something" with these machines that were set to change the world. This political attitude always had a left and anti-fascist bent, IMHO something that Germany in the 80s, and nowadays, desperately needs.
The US scene in comparison (seen from far, just to be clear) looks much more comfortable with closeness to corporate and state actors. Having worked with the intelligence community seems to be more of a badge of honor over there?
In France in comparison the scene as I see it focuses much more on making things, while organisations like La Quadrature du Net are well known but small and not at all organized/supported in the grass roots way that the CCC is. Which is why they seem to enjoy the CCC events, it's always great to have them there. :)
I might be getting this very wrong, like I said I'm only seeing the US scene from "over here" and I only have shallow interaction with the French scene.
I'd also love to hear from other places and how your local nerd communities do in terms of taking political agency.
I left the CCC in 2020 after C3 crew decided that the cock.li mail-service is a fascist and started, escalated, and carried out an attack on its administrator Vincent Canfield [1].
Sorry, but throwing someone on the floor in front of the congress building for registering clearly sarcastic domains such as "hitler.rocks" and "nuke.africa" is just not what I understand under anti-facism. It's merely a power move for confirming your own moral superiority. I mean, just look at the website, and you will clearly see that the whole site is meant as a joke.
If you want to be political, you shouldn't start with labelling someone as "fac|rac|sex-ist" because that implicitly means that it's the end of the discussion. That's not how politics should work. Paul Graham wrote a wonderful essay about this. [2]
I'm now just donating my ex-membership fee to my local Chaostreff, since I know what kind of person runs that place :)
> clearly sarcastic domains such as "hitler.rocks" and "nuke.africa"
When I visit the page I'm greeted by a banner with fake quotes, here is a selection:
> I'm 200% n*ger
> Come fuck with a n*ger. I'm a business man
There is nothing that indicates sarcasm or satire there when it comes to all those choices, given that the site advertises itself towards 4chan users. At best it's edgy and infantile, at worst it's just the usual racist shit that is "funny" only to the people repeating it very loudly over and over and over.
Weird how the only flavour of "sarcasm" and "humor" people like you and the site owner can come up with is the glorification of nazis and making fun of black people.
For whatever reason, you are leaving out the fact that the testimonial section is user-generated content.
Everyone who donates at least $5 can put a testimonial up there. I think it's pretty prominent, shown right below the donation button under bitcoin/monero logo on the donation page.
Anyway, it could also be that I'm emotionally dumbed down in this respect after spending years on the internet, but I don't feel offended by this at all. Do you feel offended enough to kick the admin on the floor?
Do you have a trusted person that you can hit up for some advice on how human interaction in a society works? Please do it.
Because the more I read from you, the more I believe that you are either severely mentally ill or just an enormous asshole. I don't care what it is, but fix yourself.
And to answer the question: That guy should be grateful that he left with all his teeth, cause secu doesn't mess around. That's how wrong you are, and none of your entitled whining will change that.
With every sentence you write you manage to make yourself look more like an oceanic garbage patch of a human being.
I feel sorry for you that you seem to be absolutely unable to reflect your own behavior.
1) Disingenuously frame someone being removed from premises where they are not welcome as "decided that X is a fascist and started, escalated, and carried out an attack".
2) Care more about someone who runs services on "hitler.rocks", "nuke.africa" and "nigge.rs" than you care about CCC being kind and welcoming place for everyone - for example, people who might not want to be called "niggers".
3) Use "it's just joke bro" as a defense for despicable behavior.
I have no idea what someone like you was doing in CCC in the first place.
> 1) Disingenuously frame someone being removed from premises where they are not welcome as "decided that X is a fascist and started, escalated, and carried out an attack".
No, this is — to my best knowledge — what happened.
> 2) Care more about someone who runs services on "hitler.rocks", "nuke.africa" and "nigge.rs" than you care about CCC being kind and welcoming place for everyone - for example, people who might not want to be called "niggers".
No one is calling anyone like this. But I see that it's intentionally provoking through obscenity. However, it is not possible to determine the boundary between “obscene” and “non-obscene” according to factual characteristics, and everything about this is subjective:
For some people graffiti is obscene, for some people kissing in public is obscene, for some people name-calling is obscene, and some aren't concerned with whatever you do.
In fact, we can see this in this discussion: I see that the domain is using the TLD to break a taboo and to get attention, but I don't see an insult in this as it's not redirected at anyone harmfully. It's all up to the reader's interpretation.
> 3) Use "it's just joke bro" as a defense for despicable behavior.
I would agree with you, if he would actually make differences between race or sex. But he doesn't.
In the end it's just a vanity domain, which to me is funny for the reason that so many people get hung up on it, which is most likely the desired effect.
> Sorry, but throwing someone on the floor in front of the congress building for registering clearly sarcastic domains such as "hitler.rocks" and "nuke.africa" is just not what I understand under anti-facism.
I'm not familiar with what happened there, but at least to me these domain names are definitely not "clearly sarcastic".
> I'm not familiar with what happened there, but at least to me these domain names are definitely not "clearly sarcastic".
Have you taken a look at the website? [1] You should be able to detect that the site is satire within a few seconds.
Of course, we could dig up the whole “what is satire, what is x-ism” controversy up again, like after the Charlie Hebdo shooting. But I do believe that it's a joke, especially when looking at the context (what most people apparently don't do).
And before labelling someone as a fascist, that's undoubtedly the thing that you should do first: look at the context.
Why is cock.li trolling but the CCC is serious business? Perhaps they were just giving him a wedgie for ironic reasons.
My point is here is that it's very easy to fall into a pattern of 'it's satire when I do it to you, but it's cancel culture* when you do it to me'. I don't think of (or even about) the cock.li admin as a fascist particularly, but I'd be very surprised if he wasn't fully aware that his domain is very popular with fascist trolls and used for quick and easy sockpuppet manufacture and has been for years. You could believe in the importance of making anonymous email widely accessible and keep doing that, without necessarily pandering to the worst of examples of the people who use your service.
* or whatever the equivalent moral outrage of the moment is.
I actually enjoyed reading this comment because it's one of the few, which made me think and weren't just attacks or labelling.
I disagree with “it's satire when I do it to you, but it's cancel culture”. Yes, this statement gets often used by people who try to victimize themselves, but I don't think it's the case here. I can't find the words right now to express reasoning right now, but I'll come back later and revisit this post.
> but I'd be very surprised if he wasn't fully aware that his domain is very popular with fascist trolls and used for quick and easy sockpuppet manufacture and has been for years
Yes! I would be surprised too, if there weren't users who are coming from the right wing, but imo cock.li is actually a bad choice if you intend to harass someone online: The major social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Discord, Xenforo (customizable) and YouTube just straight up block all domains from cock.li from signing up because they have the same reputation as trash mails: They can be almost endlessly created without any major cost.
Besides that, the service also undeniably experienced abuse, like the bomb threat which was sent by some student to his school from madbomber@cock.li. But I think that's what happens when you mix young people (maybe social rejects?) + privacy. Same stuff as on 4chan.
Something else that made me wondering just at this moment: Reddit still does not require any kind of mail when signing up. This is quite surprising to me.
No, I haven't, because the parent comment was referring to registering these domains, not about what they serve.
I also don't want to judge whether whatever happened at that C3 was justified, but rather that it's not clear from just domain names if there meant in a sarcastic way or not.
>I left the CCC in 2020 after C3 crew decided that the cock.li mail-service is a fascist and started, escalated, and carried out an attack on its administrator Vincent Canfield [1].
You choose to ignore the anti-trans posters they hung up in the conference center.
Well, the dead account has some links which I won't repost. Feel free to reach out over IRC or email if you want other/more links I guess.
From what I gather is that the conflict around the website started at 35C3 with the posters and the general shitposting. It was pinned to the cock.li assembly and vc was then asked to not come back. Which they did 36C3 and resulted in the above video.
Whether or not vc knew all of this, or was directly involved, I don't know.
There were threads in 4chan /g/ around 35c3. Hard to find the photos now, but "Trans aren't real girls
wake up 35c3" post with the number "69115371" is in the thread: https://archive.ph/ki6Un
See other posts to get the impression.
cock.li, /g/, 4chan joint assembly printed and spammed these posters and their logo (you can see it in the OP post thumbnail) all around and were explicitly told not to organize an assembly on 36c3.
Regardless, Vincent Canfield decided to come to 36c3 and started conflicts somewhere around the Tor, GNUNet and some activist/political projects around there, then refused to get out when told to do so by orga and called the police.
At some point in the future, people will be studying and analyzing 4chan trolling the way they analyzed British political satire rags of the 1800s.
It is a new form of writing, though. Satire, today, is thought of as something that is known to be false, while trolling seems to be characterized by a sort of "stochastic truth" where the author is purposely ambiguous about whether they believe it or not. It lets the author of a piece of trolling say things that are clearly over the line, and mean it. It lets the author walk back the statements if they are unpopular and lean in if they are popular.
I do wonder if original pieces of satire and parody from hundreds of years ago were written with the intention of the same ambiguity of truth.
Political satire being taken as truth[0] comes with the territory. In fact, that's kind of the implicit joke. We laugh at every politician that reads an Onion article and thinks they need to rally the wagons to stop the $8bn Planned Parenthood Abortionplex. It is a rhetorical prank on the rich and powerful.
The problem with 4chan political trolling is that they always use the same fucking joke and there's no underlying satire to pick up upon. "Here's some people who don't fit in to the default social mold, now laugh and mock." This isn't satire, there's no rhetorical prank. This is just pissing in an ocean of piss. Even treating the board as a whole performative art piece is just running the OneJoke recursively against a large swath of probably-white, possibly-poor, definitely autistic people.
There is no ambiguity of truth. The people who treated /pol/ as satire up and left decades ago. The only people who remain are true believers interested in hurting people, including themselves.
How does this fit together?:
"Here's some people who don't fit in to the default social mold, now laugh and mock."
“a large swath of probably-white, possibly-poor, definitely autistic people.”
Also, Wikipedia says 4chan launched in 2003. 19 years ago. Which I doesn’t count as decades.
…waaait a minute… has my autism just eaten your onion? Layers upon layers to this satire thing haha
Not sure where that guy is from (and also dont want to judge the story at all),..
BUT there is not much like that here but one of the few and also by law forbidden taboos is this. With that, you are never clearly sarcastic, the opposite. No excuse, sorry.
For a long time, cock.li was hosted on Hetzner - until a bunch of bomb threats to schools in the US originated there. There was a fun little bit of government overreach involved too, since the german police seized the server twice - the first time they only took a single drive (probably as advised by Hetzner staff), and then, a week later, they demanded the entire server. It's pretty much implied that this was at the behest of US authorities, since a related FOIA request at the german feds was denied with "may cause adverse affects on international relations"
Where did the C3 crew say the service was fascist?
As far as I understand, he showed up to Congress and did a Hitlergrüße (Nazi salute) to their security. In Germany that is illegal and arrestable, so he should actually be grateful they only kicked him out and did not call the police. Germany has very strict laws against video-recording people without their consent, so creating this video would be considered another crime.
I can't speak for the content of the video itself, but I would imagine that most Germans would see "throwing someone on the floor" as a reasonable response to making the Hitlergrüße.
> As far as I understand, he showed up to Congress and did a Hitlergrüße (Nazi salute) to their security. In Germany that is illegal and arrestable, so he should actually be grateful they only kicked him out and did not call the police.
This is simply not true. Before the C3 took place, Michael required Vincent to remove all the unfunny stuff from his website to be able to register an assembly for C3. However, Vincent did not agree to this, so he didn't register an assembly.
Then, during C3 on the 27th Dec, Vincent sent out a tweet that he's on C3, and so he and a few users of his email service met informally, but not as a cock.li assembly. It wasn't a huge crowd, I think like 5 people(?).
Michael then approached Vincent and said, that he wouldn't be allowed on the premise. Vincent then offered to take it to the Arbitration Board, which was specifically set up for situations like this: When someone experiences sexism/racism or discrimination of any kind, they should take it to the AB, where the awareness team tries to find a mutually agreeable solution. Michael didn't like this proposal and just told him to leave within the next 5 Minutes.
Apparently the short-haired girl, which was following Michael, did not want to wait 5 Minutes. That's when Vincent sent an audio recording to himself and switched to video recording. That's what you see in the first post I made.
The phone which Vincent used for recording was seized by security. However, confiscating cameras or camera phones is the sole responsibility of the police or the bailiff. Stewards and security guards are not allowed to do that.
> Germany has very strict laws against video-recording people without their consent, so creating this video would be considered another crime.
This isn't true either. You are allowed to record if you have legitimate interests in recording the current event, e.g. when a friend gets knocked down to the floor by other people, as the others would be free to leave the scene if they really wanted to. However, you are not allowed to release the footage to a public forum without the consent of the party that displays the helplessness.
from my recollections , he was asked not to go, and he went there to ‘troll.’ he went to a gathering he was asked not to attend with the intention of being annoying, the hosts removed him.
i can’t think of a single bar, restaurant, etc in the world which won’t eject someone when they intentionally cause trouble. particularly if the person has been told they aren’t welcome.
why do some people struggle with this extremely basic rudimentary thing we teach every child—if youre annoying on purpose, people will treat you like you’re an annoying person.
just because some want to rename ‘be annoying’ to ‘trolling’ this doesn’t change the response you’re going to get.
again, this is super basic stuff. if you go out of your way to annoy someone, people get annoyed. very basic. it’s not shocking. it’s not scandalous. it’s basic behavior.
I left in 2018 for a similar reason. People there got really strict about what is an acceptable opinion and what not. I'm a person who is quick to say what i think, and sometimes its nonsense, and i feel most comfortable in environments where people can point out where you have the flaw in your thinking.
The scene around CCC is not like that. If you challenge some thinking there, people will feel threatened and will start looking for reasons to have you removed. The escalation with VC was another iteration of that, but not the first i witnessed.
Some Erfa's are still good, but my local one isn't, and after 34C3, i think the congress isn't, either. The CrewCrew secret police thing is still creeping me out.
The CCC is not run by hackers or for hackers. They are not considerate of viewpoints and ideas other than their own. They push a Marxist agenda where it is not wanted or needed whilst at the same time maximizing their own financial gain. If you have the balls (or stupidity) to point this out you are a fascist. Welcome to the CCC...
No, because it takes priority over the question of truth or falsity, and it outweighs everything else the person has done. Regardless how positive its impact has been.
Oh, like when some random person who is just trying to get by is subjected to slurs based on some aspect of their identity.
I could take the argument you made in a parallel thread and say that people who feel upset at being labeled fascist or racist or sexist could just choose not to be offended. Why is the question of truth/falsity suddenly so important when it impacts them, whereas it's irrelevant when they wish to make satirical/ironic statements that may or may not impact others?
Separate the artist from his art, and all this bullshit. That's the usual neolib reasoning, nothing new. Capitalists historically never had a problem with Fascism, only posturing.
> The US scene in comparison (seen from far, just to be clear) looks much more comfortable with closeness to corporate and state actors.
this is true, and it's one of the reasons I helped start cyberia.club and layerze.ro - US tech is deeply entwined with megacorps and it sucks the joy out of hacking, at least imho.
I too love a good talk on (e.x exploit research) and longingly wonder if in part due to attempts of censorship by companies, also the value of exploits if the 'glory times' of such presentations are over. Ultimately I respect the CCC for providing a platform to discuss difficult problems adjacent to technology as well.
I agree completely. There are many things I like about CCC. For example, corporate sponsorship is forbidden, and many speakers use handles rather than their legal name. This distancing from $dayjob helps to prevent government/military and corporations from undue influence, and also frees the speakers to say what they actually think about a technology, not fearing that they will lose their job over it.
Regarding the political bent, one big difference from the US is that people at CCC will openly express their disagreements, and are generally respectful about it. The only limitations are that Nazis are not allowed, which is partly because they are forbidden by law.
Absolutely. I can't reason people out of positions they haven't reasoned them into.
Apart from that, your whole comment is so fantastically out of touch and anglo-centric, that it's actually quite funny:
None of your "abstain from politics", "Marxist ideology" sound bites will elicit a reaction from the target audience of the congress, except laughter and ridicule.
It just reads as your FOX News/QAnon consumption fried your brain and no one will take you seriously, except the pitiful "look at the American trying to impress with big words he doesn't understand".
Besides not being a monolith and this being amenable to labeling as such, it's still in many parts different from many other hacker scenes.
The CCC has always had the ambition (and backing credentials/skills) to be a political movement as much as a technological one. In fact that's the origin story of the Congress; Wau Holland inviting others to "do something" with these machines that were set to change the world. This political attitude always had a left and anti-fascist bent, IMHO something that Germany in the 80s, and nowadays, desperately needs.
The US scene in comparison (seen from far, just to be clear) looks much more comfortable with closeness to corporate and state actors. Having worked with the intelligence community seems to be more of a badge of honor over there?
In France in comparison the scene as I see it focuses much more on making things, while organisations like La Quadrature du Net are well known but small and not at all organized/supported in the grass roots way that the CCC is. Which is why they seem to enjoy the CCC events, it's always great to have them there. :)
I might be getting this very wrong, like I said I'm only seeing the US scene from "over here" and I only have shallow interaction with the French scene.
I'd also love to hear from other places and how your local nerd communities do in terms of taking political agency.