Strictly speaking, unless you do destructive actions, it's not stealing, but instead unauthorized access.
If I walk into your house, take a picture of your financial documents, that's not theft. That's still (potentially:) breaking and entering, trespassing, and depending on what I do with those pictures also fraud, but it's not theft.
This is all semantics of course, but I just really dislike the idea that digital data can be "stolen".
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But also: No one deserves to get their things broken into, but if you expose things to the internet without proper security, you can't cry too much if you get broken into I think. It's not okay (and possibly illegal? idk) for me to read other patients' medical records if they're in open display when I go to the doctor's office, but they also have an obligation to secure this information.
I do like the approach of "Mens rea" / "Guilty mind" overall, to differentiate of children/teenagers fucking around (ofc depends on the extent of what they do), white hat researchers finding vulnerabilities (should not be criminalized), and black hat people doing things with criminal intent.
Had a similar experience with a VP recently... not >3 levels up, but still. "I could visibly tell he was upset he even had to talk to me." feels close to home.
I made time during a family emergency, and attended a call on US west coast time while living in EU (was supposed to be 9PM for me but they pushed it to 10PM right before due to recruiter messing up the invite and having it off by a week).
He didn't ask any relevant questions. He didn't seem interested. He just looked like he was doing a favor to someone that asked him to give me a shot. Original call was supposed to be 1h, then after reschedule it was 30m, but he thanked me for my time after 20 minutes. Ofc I got rejected after, even though the people before had good opinions of me.
All in all, if you're doing hiring, at least try to look interested. phew.
Other way around: Easier tickets is an incentive for volunteers, as a bit of a payment in kind. It helps people known to volunteer come back, and it encourages them to keep volunteering year after year. You need to work, honestly, ridiculous amounts of hours to get a voucher (15-20 hours), and so it'd not be a very good incentive for average person.
You can absolutely get tickets on public sales by knowing when sales start, refreshing on the dot and doing the captcha as fast as you can. Reducing your latency (ethernet, fresh browser profile without extensions) helps. Add some friends into the mix and you'll get all the tickets you need.
These sessions would help few imo. It'd eat into people's congress time (few arrive before the event due to christmas), making it less appealing. Many also prepare their slides and talk last minute. Not a whole lot that can be done there.
Yeah, I meant this to be an online thing a week or two in advance. Doesn't help against last minute slides, but from my experience, the people doing presentations for the first time, don't prepare them so late.
It's a balance. Congress aims to be accessible ticket cost-wise to all.
Professional interpreters cost a lot of money, and as such it's done by volunteers. There's little to be done while maintaining the spirit of the event.
Nothing prevents people from redubbing talks either, which may honestly be a good community effort.
Coming to my first congress (36c3) was special in this regard: Congress was all about talks for me before, but I only went to 2 talks. Last year I went to none. This year I plan to go to none too.
Congress is a gathering ground for likeminded people from all sorts of interests. Talks can be watched at home (except for ones that are not recorded at the request of the talk-givers), but being in the room with likeminded people, talking with them, learning from them is IMO irreplaceable.
I think it was a number of reasons, covid was one of them.
- Congress on years where there's cccamp tends to be planned by people who are understandably more exhausted. 37c3 and cccamp23 were on same year and 37c3 slogan was appropriately "resource extension".
- The venue was back from Leipzig to Hamburg (CCH was doing renovations for a while, so it was moved to CCL for a few years).
- 4 years between events lead to both changes in the orga people, and general concern that the older set of people had been at this point less familiar with running an event of this scale ("can they still do it and make it feel the same?").
- Covid precautions were a divisive topic. Some didn't want precautions, some wanted more precautions. Ultimately some measures were taken, but none were mandatory. We have distributed free tests and masks last year, we'll do it again this year, though mainly aimed at volunteers, so you should bring your own mask and test if you can, see the info page^1 for full recommendations :)
All this lead to people being unsure if 37c3 would be good and not coming. But I think that trust has since been regained, seeing as this year sold out really fast (same as past years).
I think one other issue was that chaos community is getting older and many are having families, which makes going to congress between christmas and NYE difficult. We did, imo, really good outreach since then and now there's more young people joining chaos communities again. Still, coming to congress is costlier for younger people that earn less (175eur for ticket but cheaper options are available on request, plus 400-600eur in hotels, plus trains/flights/visas etc).
(I was/am part of the infection protection team at 37c3 and 38c3 but am speaking on personal capacity.)
If I walk into your house, take a picture of your financial documents, that's not theft. That's still (potentially:) breaking and entering, trespassing, and depending on what I do with those pictures also fraud, but it's not theft.
This is all semantics of course, but I just really dislike the idea that digital data can be "stolen".
---
But also: No one deserves to get their things broken into, but if you expose things to the internet without proper security, you can't cry too much if you get broken into I think. It's not okay (and possibly illegal? idk) for me to read other patients' medical records if they're in open display when I go to the doctor's office, but they also have an obligation to secure this information.
I do like the approach of "Mens rea" / "Guilty mind" overall, to differentiate of children/teenagers fucking around (ofc depends on the extent of what they do), white hat researchers finding vulnerabilities (should not be criminalized), and black hat people doing things with criminal intent.