~$ a 39th congress. this time with extra chaos.
Posted on Jan. 12th, 2026. | Est. reading time: 9 minutes
Tags: ConferenceChaos EventsVolunteeringTrain Ticket Shenanigans
the period between December 27th and December 30th is at this point a ritual moment, where i once again go to Hamburg, and once again attend the Chaos Communication Congress.
this year marked the 39th edition of the event, and would be my 3rd congress in a row, as i started with 37c3 back in 2023 and 38c3 last year (post).
buildup! at the noc
as with things that repeat, we seem to have gotten into a routine, namely with helping out at the NOC during buildup and teardown.
the NOC are a lively bunch, and are very good at making me feel welcome and that my contributions are values, whether it is just handing me a key and 50k dollars worth of network switches and other equipment and sending me on a quest to deploy stuff, or whether it is just me re-crimping a hundred ethernet cables that have suffered the wear and tear of a multitude of events.
they are also a very bonded unit, which means that there is good communication, and fantastic shenanigans. one such shenanigan involved the BOC (bottle operations center), which haphazardly enforced a 5 bottles per person rule and refused to sell our emissary anything because of the new rule. in the spirit of malicious compliance, the entire noc walked down and bought 5 bottles at a time, while being handed money by agh, our glorious ringleader.
another tradition that helps us bond is the post-buildup christmas dinner, which this year brought us to a fantastic chinese restaurant with a multitude of vegan choices.
i’m somehow a protagonist in this conference
this year had one dramatic change compared to the previous years: i’d always been an attendee and a volunteer, but i’d never gotten on stage at this big of an event before! (my talk at DEFCON doesn’t count, it was a village).
yes, this year i was one of the speakers on the main stage, alongside train ticket shenanigans co-conspirator and mostly ringleader Q (a being of various sorts of fame and infamy - of the good kind - in these circles).
this talk would pick up a full year after Q’s talk on the DeutschlandTicket at 38c3 (“What’s inside my train ticket?” which you can watch on media.ccc.de), which involved Q (and friends, including myself) somehow getting recruited into doing train ticket shenanigans for the International Union of Railways’ Flexible Content Barcode User Group (UIC - Union Internationale des Chemins de Fer | FCB | UG) and continuing to help make Zügli a thing.
it was titled “All my DeutschlandTickets are gone! - Fraud at an industrial scale” and focused on the several scams and criminal sites that we noticed in our efforts to understand what was going on in the DeutschlandTicket sphere, ironically prompted by certain tickets submitted to Zügli that made no sense (as in: were malformed, contained data that was never seen, etc.).
the buildup to the talk wasn’t as terrifying as it should’ve been, but as soon as we were on stage, staring into the light of the projectors, seeing the many seats fill up in the largest room at congress, the anxiety took hold a bit.
it didn’t help that about 4 minutes into the 15 minute changeover, our stage manager Marvin up and asked the crowd “if there’s an empty seat next to you, raise your hand please”. i later got told that the talk was apparently hard to physically attend, which was surprising to me as none of the talks i had (co-)presented had that large of an audience (maybe at most 200 people), the jump to 1500-3000 or so beings was significantly intimidating.
after some mild technical issues that were resolved on the stage (such as a hyperlinked embedded image not loading), Marvin then introduced us and the talk, which is when i locked in and decided “que sera, sera”, and all the apprehension melted away.
all in all, the talk went relatively well despite some of my awkwardness and shyness, and it seems that it was well-received. you can view the talk on media.ccc.de or below:
of course, as this was a talk which had already generated a bit of media attention (at the very least in the sense of articles in taz.de, Die Zeit as well as heise), we were flooded with questions and also were asked to participate in two interviews, one of which was with DeutschlandFunk, a well known German journalism unit.
Marvin also invited us onto their podcast, to discuss the relevance of the talk and its origins, which we were happy to do.
after all this chaos (pun intended), i was pretty sapped and decided to take it easy for the rest of congress. it being congress meant that i of course was going to in fact not be taking it as easy as would have been desirable, but a best effort was made.
hanging out with critters
as congress is - for me - a mostly social event, i of course spent a lot of time meeting and hanging out with a variety of beings.
the one big difference compared to last year is that this year i was also involved in an assembly of Swiss chaos spaces, such as the UwU-Space (the hackspace i cofounded last year, i’ll write something about that at some point) and the Chaostreff Bern. as i was somewhat involved and it was also a likely place to run into a bunch of friends, and i ended up hanging out there quite often.
as with every previous year, my friends Alyx and Erin were around, and Alyx ended up once more orchestrating the meowing session.
another staple of congress that i once more attended was the Maskenbal which Nik / Furthr was once more DJ’ing at, which once more resulted in a banger set.
the vibes
this congress felt a bit different than last years’ congress, but it might’ve been because i’ve gotten used to it, and that i don’t have the sense of wonder and amazement of the previous years.
this wasn’t to say the event wasn’t good or fun, just that with the accumulated stress and fatigue of giving a talk and having been on site for 7 days already, it was harder to walk around without getting recognized, either because of the talk, or because of other things that have happened over the last few years.
tearing it all down
as with every other year, as soon as the closing talk starts, the NOC goes into teardown mode. this involves the layout at the NOC changing completely into a multi-stage multi-buffer drop zone, with carts full of switches, AP’s, fiber, ethernet cables, etc. being brought and triaged in the first stage, and then equipment ingestion being performed in the second stage, and equipment wiping in the last stage, with rewby‘s cthulhu project (on GitHub) accelerating the process dramatically.
the NOC has gotten so efficient at teardown that we were done before midnight, which was a record for us.
we will see if this keeps up at next year’s 40c3, which we have now learned will drag us away from the well-known and well-traveled corridors of the Congress Center Hamburg, and into Messe Hamburg, which - although a few hundreds of meters away - is a completely different layout that we will need to re-learn.
once teardown was done, we hung out and “after-partied” a bit, before heading to our hotel and starting to rest a bit. the next day being new year’s eve, we just hung out and chilled in Hamburg, trying our best to avoid the noise of the fireworks.
on new year’s day, we slowly headed to Hamburg Hbf and boarded the ICE that would bring us all the way back to Switzerland, bringing this somewhat long journey to a satisfying close.
