a media-almost-archaeology on data that is too dirty for "AI" (39c3)

when datasets are scaled up to the volume of (partial) internet, together with the idea that scale will average out the noise, large dataset builders came up with a human-not-in-the-loop, cheaper-than-cheap-labor method to clean the datasets: heuristic filtering. Heuristics in this context are basically a set of rules came up by the engineers with their imagination and estimation to work best for their perspective of “cleaning”. Most datasets use heuristics adopted from existing ones, then add some extra filtering rules for specific characteristics of the datasets. I would like to invite you to...

Von wegen Eisblumen! Wie man mit Code, Satelliten und Schiffsexpeditionen die bunte Welt des arktischen Phytoplanktons sichtbar macht (39c3)

Die Arktis ist eine Region, in der die Sonne monatelang weg ist, dickes Meereis den Weg versperrt und deshalb Forschungsdaten ziemlich rar sind. Kompliziert also, herauszufinden was im Wasser blüht! Mit einer Kombination aus Satellitenbildern, Expeditionen und Modellsimulationen auf Hochleistungsrechnern versuche ich, das Verborgene sichtbar zu machen: die faszinierende, farbenfrohe Welt des arktischen Phytoplanktons. Im Arktischen Ozean wird immer deutlicher, wie stark die globale Erwärmung den Rückgang des Meereises und das marine Ökosystem beeinflussen. Winzige Organismen, das Phytoplankton, bilden die Grundlage des Nahrungsnetzes durch den Aufbau von Biomasse und spielen so eine zentrale Rolle im...

Teckids – eine verstehbare (digitale) Welt (39c3)

Die Teckids-Gemeinschaft bringt Kinder, Jugendliche und Erwachsene zusammen, um gemeinsam aktiv für eine verstehbare (digitale) Welt zu sein. Bei Teckids geht es nicht "nur" um Technikbasteln und Programmieren mit Kindern, sondern darum, mit anderen, für andere, bei Events und gesellschaftlich aktiv zu werden. In letzter Zeit haben wir viele Projekte dafür unternommen. Unter anderem haben wir den neuen Themen-Slot "Jung und überwacht" bei den BigBrotherAwards 2025 gestaltet und bereiten Jugendthemen für das nächste Jahr vor. Zum zweiten Mal laden wir beim 39c3 Kinder beim Fairydust-Türöffner-Tag "hinter die Kulissen" der Chaos-Teams ein. Unser Slogan mit dem etwas merkwürdigen...

What Makes Bike-Sharing Work? (39c3)

Bike- and e-bike-sharing promise sustainable, equitable mobility - but what makes these systems successful? Despite hundreds of cities operating thousands of shared bikes, trip data is rarely public. To address this, we built a geospatial analysis pipeline that reconstructs trip data from publicly accessible system status feeds. Using this method, we gathered **43 million km** of bike-sharing trips across **268 European cities**. Combined with over **100 urban indicators** per city, our analyses reveal how infrastructure, climate, demographics, operations, and politics shape system performance. We uncover surprising insights - such as why some e-bike systems...

Greenhouse Gas Emission Data (39c3)

Data about greenhouse gas emissions, both from countries and individual factories, is often publicly available. However, the data sources are often not as accessible and reliable as they should be. EU emission databases contain obvious flaws, and nobody wants to be responsible. Which factory in my city is the largest emitter of CO2? Which industrial sector is responsible for the largest share of a country's contribution to climate change? It should not be difficult to answer these questions. Public databases and reporting required by international agreements usually allow us to access this data. However, trying to access and work with these datasets...

APT Down and the mystery of the burning data centers (39c3)

In August 2025 Phrack published the dump of an APT member's workstation. It was full of exploits and loot from government networks, cell carriers and telcos. The dump sparked a government investigation, and corpos like LG and Korea Telecom were asked to explain themselves. Hours before an onsite audit, the data center mysteriously caught fire, destroying almost a hundred servers. Then another data center burned - and unfortunately, there was even one death. The talk aims to revisit this mysterious sequence of tragic incidents. [TW: Suicide, self-harm] In August 2025 Phrack published the dump of an APT...

Programmierte Kriegsverbrechen? (39c3)

Die automatisierten Zielsysteme des israelischen Militärs zeigen gut, wie KI-baserte Kriegsautomatisierung aktuell aussieht, was daran falsch läuft und warum wir Techies uns einmischen müssen Das Thema „KI in der Militärtechnik“ und die Beziehung zwischen Mensch und Maschine ist seit Jahrzehnten ein Thema in der Friedensbewegung, der Konfliktforschung, der Philosophie, den Sozialwissenschaften und den kritischen Data & Algorithm Studies. Doch in den letzten Jahren wurden Waffensysteme mit KI-Komponenten entwickelt und auch praktisch in bewaffneten Konflikten eingesetzt. Dabei reicht die Anwendung von Drohnensteuerung über optische Zielerfassung bis hin zur logistischen Zielauswahl. Am Beispiel KI-gestützter Zielwahlsysteme, die vom...

Block Domains and Advertisements in a ZTE DSL Router

In one of my previous blog posts I showed how to install and run PiHole DNS server locally as a Docker container in your Synology NAS server. This worked great as the PiHole dashboard shows the list of identified annoying advert requests that were blocked shows.

So far I did configure my PiHole DNS server within my Chrome browser so that the browser cant load those annoying domains anymore. This worked like a charm, until quite recently Google updated Chrome browser to only allow a ‘secured DNS connection’ which actually seems a bit of a trojan horse for their own ads...

OpenTelemetry Astroshop Simulator

Astroshop is a great way of testing and running a demo scenario that offers with a large spectrum of technologies, services and a realistic problem scenario of running a real shop in serverless or Kubernetes infrastructure.

Besides, Astroshop being a great way to demo and test observability platforms such as Dynatrace and to run problem scenarios on demand, its also a bit cumbersome to deploy it for testing purposes. Imagine that you are a local developer that just needs to quickly run a test for a new feature using OTel traces and spans. Deploying Astroshop or any other scenario always comes...

The Small Packet of Bits That Can Save (or Destabilize) a City (39c3)

The Emergency Alert System (EAS) and its SAME (Specific Area Message Encoding) protocol are public alerting technologies that broadcast short digital bursts over VHF triggering emergency messages on millions of receivers across North America. In Mexico, this technology was integrated into the Seismic Alert System (SASMEX) which more than 30 million people in the central part of the country rely on to prepare for frequent earthquakes. While new alerting technologies have emerged, the EAS-SAME network continues to play an important role for public safety in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. Yet, the same small packets...