29c3 is my first Congress I visited. It returned to Hamburg after 8 years of being held in Berlin and is located at the Conference Center Hamburg (CCH). First day’s talk were mostly non-technical ones.

Not my department by Jacob Appelbaum proposed that people should develop more software like Tor or similiar tools.

The second talk titled Enemies of the State: What Happens When Telling the Truth about Secret US Government Power Becomes a Crime was about breaking the US constitution by the US goverment and the rise of spying practices after 11th September 2001 covered as the fight against the terrorism. Speakers talked about ways how NSA wants to monitor people and store everything they can about them. They also suggested that people should care more about their privacy. After all, anonymity and privacy are the basic right of the every human being on the planet. This talk was given by ex-employees of NSA and US DoJ.

The last talk I visited was about the mitigation of timing side channels by Sebastian Schinzel. He proposed several new countermeasures and wrote set of tools, which should detect timing side channels vulnerabilities. More info can be found on his website.

After the last talk, I returned to the hostel and drunk mate with Juraj. Rest of the group joined us later and several polish hackers came as well. Discussions were mostly security-related.