Some people call it hacker congress, some people call it security congress and some people call it nerd congress, but in facts it’s simply the largest IT congress in Europe. Each year the hacker community meets from the 27th to the 30th. With 9000 visitors (2013) it’s the largest event for computer experts. It is designed as a low budget congress, to support younger people (students, pupil, …). It is completely driven by volunteers.

The lectures on this congress are part of one of these eight tracks:

• Art & Beauy
• Security & Safety
• Ethics, Society & Politics
• Hardware & Making
• Science & Engineering
• CCC (public, but more internal)
• Deutschlandfunk (public service broadcasting statutory corporation)
• Others (small talks)

The talk about ATMs (bank cash machines) was a more or less typical talk in the track Safety & Security: “Most automated teller machines (ATMs) run regular Windows systems and can be controlled like any other computer. The first public demonstration of an ATM hack was given in 2010 – but how bad is this threat really? It turns out there is a multi-million dollar business behind ATM hacks. This talk reveals how these criminal gangs operate by disclosing information obtained through forensic analysis of a real compromise.” The speakers tw and sb showed in detail how to hack an ATM.

In the category Hardware & Making you will find talks like “Rock’ em Graphic Cards”. It’s all about how to use the power of graphic cards for computing: “In my talk, I will introduce data- and task-based parallelism on multi cores as a basis. The well-known standards mentioned here will be OpenMP and OpenMPI. And then I will show you the hardware-close programming languages CUDA and OpenCL. I will also mention OpenACC and C++AMP as one possible way towards more abstraction and better code maintainability.”

After 12 o’clock in the evening they had fun events at the congress like the Fnord News Show or Hacker Jeopardy. The Hacker Jeopardy is an adaptation of the famous TV show. It’s fun for all participants, so that the main room with around 6000 seats was filled very quickly before this event had started!

Many thanks to all of the volunteers (so called angles), supporters (host europe,  juniper, kpn, babiel, …) and to the chaos computer club for this event. See you at 31C3!