I was quite surprised, yet very happy, to discover chaos-darmstadt, a local Chaos Computer Club (CCC) in Darmstadt. CCC is one of the biggest and most influential hacker organizations. It is based in Germany and other German-speaking countries and currently has over 4,000 members. They became world famous when they hacked the German “Bildschirmtext” computer network and succeeded in getting a bank in Hamburg to debit the online account with DM 134,000 in favor of the club. The money was returned the next day in front of the press.
Once I’ve found their website I posted an “Hello” message to their mailing list and in less than one hour I got three replies. It seems they have a meeting each Tuesday (starting at 8PM) at TU Darmstadt – Technischen Universität Darmstadt.
I was even more impressed when I found they are organizing a big event next weekend, called meta rhein main chaos days 111b, where they are going to hold a Capture the Flag security contest, besides other events and lectures.
This type of contest particularly appeals to me, as I have organized 2 or 3 of them back in Portugal in different occasions. It was usually during a LAN party or an local event where me and some friends would set up such a thing. It’s the type of thing where you meet a lot of interested geeks and where you learn a lot (resulting from the sleep deprivation of long hours at the computer of course).
Well, this one seems pretty well organized and I’m looking forward. I’ll even try to find myself a local team to join if I can (the registration period for new teams is already closed). They have over 20 teams signed up now and most of them are external, only participating via the Internet, which is quite interesting as well.
