This speech about how the hacker scene is failing its own ideals and what questions must be addressed to make a real difference.
Every year Chaos Congress is a venerable display of ingenuity in the hacker scene. Every year there are more visitors, more and often better talks on security issues, society, culture and technology in general. At the same time the social and political clouds that appeared on the horizon are now overhead and are even darker than expected. Discussing last year's big exploits and congratulating each other on our ingenuity in finding them is not enough. We have to wipe the smug grins from our faces and take a long hard look into the mirror. Because there are several questions that are often unasked because we may not have the answer to them. Not solving these puzzles also means that we cannot prevent the infocoalypse of big data, the internet of things, the military-industrial-surveillance complex as well as organised crime mucking up our lives. So let us talk about our failures to: - explain general purpose computing to laypersons; - preventing security weaknesses from happening; - articulate security risks to everyday people and politicians alike; - educate fellow tech people about them, And why they are failures and why there is an urgent need to fix them.
Speakers: Walter van Holst