The best of 28C3

I already posted deeper thoughts about some particular talks, but I’ve been watching talks from 28C3 all week, and now that the high-quality permlink videos are up, I want to share some of my favoites. If you would like several hours of background video that will make you a smarter, and possibly better, person, these are excellent.

Roger Dingledine, Jacob Applebaum – How governments have tried to block Tor (Video)
This is the real hacking to change the world for the better situation. These are the hackers who are protecting the people who will get chopped up and mailed to their families for what they say. They deserve all the respect and support in the world. I’m not intellectually equipped to help with Tor, but it is always good to keep humanitarian aspects of engineering in mind – both what you can do to help, and when you may, even inadvertanly, do harm.

Bunnie Huang – Implementation of MITM Attack on HDCP-Secured Links (Video)
I hadn’t really considered the collection of non-infringing desirable things that HDCP ruins (Ever wonderd why Picture-in-Picture stopped being so common? Blame the copyright industry and HDCP.) Bunnie thought about it, and made a consumer-grade product that fixes it. The FPGA crypto+signal work is badass, the hardware platform is awesome, and seeing how it went together as a consumer product is inspiring.

Meredith Patterson – The Science of Insecurity (Video)
Thoughts in a previous post here.

Cory Doctorow – The Coming War on General Compution (Video)
This is why you invite SciFi authors to technical conferences. It lacks the technical depth of most of the other talks I bumped, but it’s insightful and far looking and right.

Evgeny Morozov – Marriage from Hell (video)
This was the keynote, and, unlike most keynotes, really did set the tone for much the conference. The basis of the talk was discussing the issues of large scale surveillance technology, and the role of western companies and governments in creating and perpetuating the industry. A big part of the message is that the technology being paid for for monitoring employees in commercial settings and “lawful intercept” is being sold to authoritarian governments for whom such technologies would otherwise be out of reach, to hunt their citizens.
I thought the Tor talk above actually made a more forceful argument, but this is a better starting point. The hackers have been harping about this for far longer than the rest of the world: these are the people who have been handling the forbidden knowledge computing opens up, and they saw the disaster coming. The freakout isn’t about what large scale surveillance is going to do to hackers – we have the tools to protect ourselves – it’s what it will do to everyone else.

Ang Cui, Jonathan Voris – Print Me If You Dare (Video)
There was some stupid news responses to this (of the “OMG T3H H4XORS WILL BLOW UP YOUR PRINTER” variety) when it was first disclosed, but the hack itself is terribly clever. The reverse engineering foo is tight, the hole they exploit is a classic “I would have done that but … facepalm” kind of hole, and the attacks it enables are a massive evolution of a known mechanism.

Geeks and depression panel(video)
The geek community tends to have depression issues – this isn’t news. The hacker community is an amazing, close, supportive community – this won’t surprise many geeks, but it might surprise others. They talk about this reality. The session is, by the way, really hard to watch. I’m not ashamed to say it made me tear up.

I haven’t seen every session, or even every English session, so I’m no doubt missing some good stuff. There were definitely some other awesome talks; the GSM and USB Reverse Engineering ones were awesome but don’t have quite the same “YOU MUST WATCH THIS” pull to them. I welcome suggestions for other amazing things I may have missed.