24C3 - Part 2

I only managed one more day at the 24C3, there is only so much my brain can process...

We had a tools meeting in the morning for the German Wikipedia group. I met some nice people there who are developing all sorts of tools for use with Mediawiki and for the Wikipedia. There is a tool server for Foundation-approved projects, but since this is not necessarily always a given, we debated some sort of own server. Subversion seems to be the revision control system of choice, so I really need to figure this out. Tried to get it sorted out for my project last summer, but I didn't have the time to concentrate on it. I need to start my New Year's resolutions for 2008 :)

Then I went to the Hamburg Election Pen discussion. A group of CCC people took apart the Logitech pen that the Swedish company Anoto sets up to "record" elections. Just a little Photoshopping suffices to produce paper that will count as a vote for candidate X, no matter what is actually voted. And no one understands exactly what the Bluetooth or the reset button do exactly....

Anyway, Hamburg did the right thing and pulled the plug on this project, they are voting on paper. Extra points to Hamburg for that!

None of the next talks really interested me, so I wandered around looking for SJ from OLPC. I'd been looking for him for 2 days. I saw all the XOs (green with envy) but he was always just left when I showed up. I started into letting a guy demonstrate the XO to me, when I finally spotted SJ out of the corner of my eye. I dashed over, and he made time for me. We sat in the middle of a maelstrom of noise as I explained the Wikidossier to him that one of my students made.

I had heard that he was looking for something like this and indeed he was. We started spinning some wild ideas, so he got out his notebook to take some notes. Annie joined in, and she had a nice idea that I decided to put on my thesis list. Maybe I'll find a student soon for this. Anyway, he let me play with an XO while he ran off to talk with someone else, that was fun.

I headed off to the Füchse handball game (a wonderful win with 9000 people in the hall, really great) and came back to look for Annie. She was in the Tor talk, people said, and I had heard a lot about Tor, so I squeezed into the room.

Turns out Tor is the project of this Roger guy I enjoyed talking with 2 summers ago at c-base, and his talk was really interesting. It is about anonymity of location on the Internet, a burning question. Couldn't find Annie, but I did run into some other guys to talk with, and suddenly it was evening and I had promised to show up for dinner with friends, so I bid farewell.

I tried to follow the Arctic talk the next morning by video stream, but neither the video nor the audio streams were working. Oh well.

Now, I have to get all my exercises corrected. Don't want to be taking them into 2008 with me.